Admittedly, this is one of the easiest shows to get into, in some ways; the series’ premise is explained neatly and succinctly in under two minutes by the opening credits. The show is little more than a vehicle to make fun of old movies much the way classic horror hosts like Vampira and Ghoulardi did, and the actual premise (mad scientists experiment on the effect of bad movies on the human brain, as measured by a guy and his robot companions forced to watch said bad movies) is just an excuse to make it happen. Every episode is more or less its own self-contained story, and if you can get behind the concept of mocking cheesy sci-fi films, there’s not much more you need to know.

In fact, this is one series you definitely don’t want to watch from the very beginning; first off, the “very beginning” is only available in the form of fan bootlegs, since the series started as a local show in the Twin Cities. (I remember turning it on and thinking, “Ooh! Sci-fi movie! Huh? Why are there guys in the lower right-hand corner of the screen? Ohhhh…this is the BEST IDEA EVER!” I was so disappointed when it went to cable and I couldn’t watch it anymore. (My parents didn’t believe in cable.)) Secondly, the first season is very much all about them getting comfortable with their series; nobody had ever done anything exactly like MST3K, and it took them a while to figure out how to pace their jokes. (Which is “frequently”, by the way…they estimated that in later seasons, they wrote about 700 jokes per episode.) And thirdly, not all the episodes are legally available; the producers got broadcast rights but not video rights to most of the movies they showed, and so the process of releasing the series on DVD is as much an adventure in “What can we get the rights to?” as “What are the classic episodes?” (Fortunately, the series’ creators actually included the phrase “Keep Circulating the Tapes” in the credits for the first seven seasons, and their pro-bootlegging stance has led to a wide network of informal episode trading. So long as you buy the episodes that are commercially available, they seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging the ones that aren’t.)

So I’d skip ahead to at least Season Two, perhaps even Season Three or Four to introduce you to Joel (the original host and “man in space” for the first five seasons.) He’s got a laid-back delivery style and a penchant for silly gimmick props (the Invention Exchange, which opens every episode for the first six seasons or so, was an exercise in prop comedy.) The most recent release from Shout Factory, “MST3K Volume XX”, features several later Joel episodes (“Master Ninja” I & II, “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”), while the next release will feature five classics (the complete “Gamera” collection.) These episodes also feature the classic mad scientist duo of Doctor Clayton Forrester and his dim-witted sidekick, TV’s Frank. Doctor F is perpetually frustrated and grandiose in his schemes by Frank’s incompetence (and his own, which he chooses not to acknowledge.)

In Season Five, Joel left (due to creative conflicts over what would eventually become “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”) in the episode “Mitchell”, which may still be available through Rhino. He was replaced with Mike Nelson, head writer for the series, who played a temp at the mad science labs who got shanghaied into doing his own bad movie riffing. Shout Factory’s first DVD set, the “20th Anniversary Edition”, features three excellent Mike episodes…including the departure of Doctor Forrester at the end of Season Seven. (Cast changes are a feature of the series.)

The last three seasons, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, featured Pearl Forrester, Clayton’s mother, who vowed to carry on his work after smothering him with a pillow. She acquired her own henchmen (Professor Bobo, an ape from the titular Planet Of, and Observer, a brain in a dish with a human to carry it around) and proceeded to do her own tormenting. This era featured some experimentation with actual storylines, which some liked and some didn’t. If you like the idea, try to watch “Revenge of the Creature” through “The Deadly Mantis”, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” through “The She-Creature”, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” through “Agent for H.A.R.M.”, and “Prince of Space” through “The Projected Man”. Watching those out of order will leave you occasionally wondering why Mike is in Ancient Rome, or what Pearl is doing on a planet where apes evolved from men!!! (Luckily, you can always ignore all that and just focus on the movie.)

Eventually, the series ended…but it’s definitely not gone. Joel is currently doing “Cinematic Titanic”, a live stage show where he and several MST alumni riff on bad movies (they also have some DVDs available), while “Rifftrax” features Mike Nelson and other MST alumni riffing on major studio releases through the magic of downloadable MP3s that you can manually synch up with films like “Iron Man”, “Twilight” and “The Happening”. (They also have some DVDs available.) All are recommended.

I’ve tried to cover the basics, but really, it’s a wide and sprawling show that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. (Just think, all this space and I haven’t even mentioned “Manos: The Hands of Fate”.) Feel free to share your favorites, and remember to “repeat to yourself, ‘it’s just a show, I should really just relax!’”

Arguably, the measure by which any body that recognizes talent can be judged is to look at their track record over the years. Anyone can hand out an award (although it takes a very special type of person to get someone to hand one out to Pia Zadora…) but awards cannot dictate the judgment of history. Classic movies might not win awards, but they remain classics; some movies might be lauded with Oscar upon Oscar at the time, but wind up forgotten a decade later. And while a quick glance at the Oscars over the years has shown that they generally have a pretty good set of standards as compared to the taste of audiences over the decades (especially considering how hard it is to compare good movies–how exactly does one decide whether Jaws is better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?) But there have been a few notable missteps. Here, presented chronologically, are a few examples (as judged by me, a viewer) of times when the Oscars got it wrong.

1) 1941. Of course, 1941 should have won Best Picture easily. It had Christopher Lee and John Belushi in front of the cameras, and Steven Spielberg directing it. But audiences…hang on. Wait. Sorry. Wrong 1941. I’m actually talking about the year 1941, when the John Ford film How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture. In any other year, this wouldn’t have been a bad choice; John Ford is a legendary Hollywood director, and the film is a classic by most standards. But unfortunately for the Academy, it was up against Citizen Kane, the movie now widely considered to be the best picture not just of 1941, but ever. (“Widely”, of course, not “universally”. I, for one, will always wonder how Hellzapoppin’ didn’t even get nominated.) In all probability, the campaign waged by William Randolph Hearst against the film, which hurt it critically and financially, also damaged its chances of getting an Oscar.

2) 1952. Has anyone ever heard of The Greatest Show On Earth? Students of bad cinema, perhaps; it’s widely considered to be the worst movie ever to win Best Picture. And it’s not like it didn’t have solid competition, either; sometimes it can happen that Hollywood has a weak year overall, and films that wouldn’t make the cut wind up getting an Oscar (**cough** Gladiator **cough**), but this schmaltzy story about the Ringling Brothers Circus was up against classics like High Noon, The Quiet Man, and even films that didn’t get a nomination like Singing in the Rain. Cecil B. DeMille must have been passed over a few too many times in previous years, necessitating a “make-up” Oscar;  there’s really no other explanation as to why this undeserving candidate won.

3) 1956. Okay, look. I’m not going to suggest that Around the World in 80 Days was a terrible movie. It’s a fun popcorn flick, a blockbuster movie from an era before Hollywood really made blockbuster movies. But in a year when we saw The Court Jester, High Society, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Hollywood has never respected horror as a genre), Lust for Life, and The Searchers…the thought that none of those was even nominated, while Around the World… won, it doesn’t really sit well. (To say nothing of the films that were nominated but didn’t win. The King and I? The Ten Commandments? It’s a hard case to make that Phineas Fogg has stood the test of time better than those two.)

4) 1998. This was, of course, the year that the Academy took a lot of flack for the way it had allowed certain studios to lobby for their pictures. An Oscar had come to mean a lot of extra money for films still in the theaters and those just coming to DVD, and Miramax had gotten good at exploiting that; they released a “prestige” picture in late December, usually in a few markets to build word-of-mouth and make it eligible for an Oscar, then pushed hard for it with the Academy and rolled it out nationwide right around the time the nominations were announced. Then when it got an Oscar, they’d put it out on DVD with the words “Best Picture Winner” on the packaging, and an otherwise undistinguished romantic comedy like Shakespeare In Love suddenly became a major seller with only a modest financial outlay. But when it beat out such obviously superior candidates like Saving Private Ryan, the Academy found themselves with a bit of egg on their faces. They’ve since been a lot more guarded about letting the studios lobby for their pet films.

5) 2008. This is the one that inspired this column, actually; I imagine some film student, a hundred years from now, watching WALL-E for the twentieth or thirtieth time, marveling as always at the brilliantly daring choice to open up the film with only a single character on a dead world. They take notes on the way Pixar uses subtle shifts of movement to give astonishing amounts of personality to EVE and WALL-E, the way that their romance develops almost wordlessly, the way that WALL-E’s presence on the ship creates all sorts of tiny knock-on effects with huge consequences. They study the classic physical comedy, the attention to detail, and once again find themselves lost in the magnificence of a ground-breaking and timeless classic. Then, once again, they try to remember the film that beat it out for Best Picture. And once again, they break down and look it up because it just doesn’t stick in their minds. “Oh, that’s right,” they say, when they finally check Future Wikipedia. “WALL-E only won Best Animated Picture. It wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture that year. Something called Slumdog Millionaire won.” Then they shrug. “Never heard of it,” they say, before going back to watch WALL-E again.

I’ve been saying for a while now (ever since “Toy Story 2″, if memory serves me right) that we are living in the kind of golden age of animation that we thought had long since gone by. Pixar’s animated films, with their emphasis on story, their intricate visual brilliance, and their sheer magic, are the kind of things that people will remember as classics in a century’s time. Basically, they’ll think of Pixar today the way we think of Disney in the 1930s and 40s.

But since this is the Internet, it’s not enough to make a sweeping declarative statement: We need to turn it into a pointless, absurd comparison! (Woo, Internet!) So let’s go ahead and pit the Disney films of their classic era against the Pixar films of today, and see who comes up top.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves vs. Toy Story: On the one hand, Toy Story is a more densely layered, intricate story with more sophisticated narrative techniques. On the other hand, Snow White is sweeter, as the rivalry between Buzz and Woody is almost too intense at times to be “enjoyable”. And Disney, even in his first animated feature (actually, the first animated feature) already had a compelling grasp of imagery that made for some of cinema’s most iconic sequences. I think that I’m going to give Disney the edge here, even though Toy Story would probably beat most other entries.

Pinocchio vs. A Bug’s Life: Not even a contest in my mind. When it comes to orthoptera, Kevin Spacey’s mesmerizing Hopper easily beats out whiny, preachy, mealy-mouthed Jiminy. As to the rest of the movie, while Pinocchio does have some of the all-time champion scare-the-shit-out-of-little-kids sequences (Monstro the Whale, the kids turning into donkeys) it’s hard to actually root for the obnoxious little wooden dummy. The characters of A Bug’s Life are far more sympathetic and entertaining, and the plot holds together better than the “string of incidences” plot of Pinocchio. Pixar for the win here.

Fantasia vs. Toy Story 2: This is actually a very tough one for me. Both of these are among my favorite animated features (I’m watching Toy Story 2 as I type this) but one of them has to be better. Toy Story 2 earns major points for being a sequel with something to actually say rather than simply rehashing the incidents of the first film, but Fantasia was something never tried before (or, with the exception of Fantasia 2000, since.) It’s a dazzling feature, perhaps one of the purest expressions of art ever attempted by a commercial studio, and I have to love it a little bit more than Toy Story 2 for that. Plus, “Night on Bald Mountain”. Disney wins.

Dumbo vs. Monsters, Inc: Admittedly, Monsters, Inc isn’t one of the strongest Pixar films. Billy Crystal grates as much in animation as he does in live-action, and the sheer irritation factor of his character single-handedly knocks a great film down a notch or two. On the other hand, the crows in Dumbo? Much, much, much more than a notch. I realize that it was a different era, but still…wow. Pixar hands-down.

Bambi vs. Finding Nemo: Eerie parallels here, as both films are about single-parenting in the unforgiving world of nature. Disney’s expertly hand-animated forest is done as well in its own way as Pixar’s CGI coral reef, but I’ll give Finding Nemo the nod for its more involved story and the fact that its ending has not traumatized generations of small children. Those of you who believe that traumatizing small children is, in fact, part of what children’s films are for might choose the other way, but I’m picking Pixar here.

Cinderella vs. The Incredibles: I might be inviting controversy here by skipping films like Saludos Amigos and Melody Time, but I think that this should remain feature vs. feature, and so the Disney anthology films get a miss in favor of the full-length stories. Not like it matters, because this is The Incredibles we’re talking about, and pretty much any Disney movie is going to be steamrollered by it. I remain a comics fan, this remains one of the best super-hero films ever, and compared to it, even a sweet little Disney princess gets booted to the back of the line. No glass slipper for you, Cindy; it’s Pixar for the win here.

Alice In Wonderland vs. Cars: I know that Cars has its fans, but I actually feel like this is comparing two of the weaker entries in their respective canons. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland has the thankless task of adapting a story with almost no narrative drive whatsoever, while Cars is about car racing, a sport so boring that fatal accidents are actually welcomed as a brief respite from the monotony. Under the circumstances, I will choose the blessedly Larry the Cable Guy-free Alice, and give Disney the win on this one.

Peter Pan vs. Ratatouille: It’s interesting, but Ratatouille doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact the way that some other Pixar/Brad Bird films have; sandwiched between the immensely popular Cars and the ground-breaking WALL-E, it’s become sort of a forgotten Pixar film. And sad to say, it continues to get short shrift here, because Peter Pan is one of Disney’s best adaptations, Captain Hook one of its best villains, and Tinkerbell one of its best-loved characters. Which means that in this case, Disney wins. Poor little rat.

Lady and the Tramp vs. WALL-E: Did I say earlier that I gave Fantasia bonus points for trying something new, different, and artistic? Then I have to give WALL-E bonus points, too; not many films have the guts to open up with no human characters, no voices, and still be one of the most heart-warming and affecting character studies in years. Compared to the fantastic animation, the powerful story, and the overall quality of what could be Pixar’s best film, Lady and the Tramp is bound to come up short. Pixar by a country mile, and that’s nothing against Lady and the Tramp.

Sleeping Beauty vs. Up: On the one hand, I do have to give Sleeping Beauty points for what some consider to be the best villain in Disney’s canon, Maleficent. She’s got style, she’s got panache, and she even swears in a kid’s movie. But it also has a dull, passive heroine, a bland Prince Charming, and I’ve never been a fan of the animation style in this one. So it loses to Up on style points. Fair? Perhaps not, but I’m giving this one to Pixar.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians vs. Toy Story 3: Sorry to say, but at this point the rot was beginning to set in at Disney. The budgets were getting lower, the animation was taking short-cuts…even the films were getting shorter (One Hundred and One Dalmatians clocks in at just 79 minutes.) Pixar, on the other hand, seems to be getting stronger with every release; they’re finding more confidence, they’re learning how to do more with computer animation as processing power gets cheaper and graphics rendering becomes more powerful, and they’re established as the top dog at Disney and not worried about interference with their proven system of generating classics. This is where the picks start getting easier, and I suspect it’ll be a while before Pixar loses another head-to-head.

The final tally: By a final score of 7-4, Pixar wins! (I’m sure John Lasseter will covet this far more than the Oscars.)

And it probably isn’t the reason you think.

I’m currently temping at a Business Which Shall Not Be Named (Mostly Because It Isn’t Relevant) and they’re nice enough to have a couple of big-screen TVs scattered throughout the building, mainly because the work doesn’t actually engage the brain beyond the simple motor reflexes, and my particular duty stations me right next to one. This means I wind up watching CNN for the better part of eight hours each day while I work. (This may explain why the posts on my own blog have become somewhat more political lately. Sorry, but hearing Governor Walker explain why he raided the pension fund for Wisconsin’s teachers and gave it to his rich buddies, and why this means that he has to take away their right to negotiate contracts…it kinda gets to ya after a while.)

But that’s not what actually depresses me. (Actually, the Egypt stuff was pretty uplifting; it’s sort of how you imagine revolutions happening in the movies, with almost nobody getting hurt and the noble resistance triumphing simply through being Right and having Stick-To-It-Ive-Ness. At any moment, you expected Mubarak to suddenly remember, “Hey, I’ve got guns and tanks and shit!” And he never did.) Certainly, I’m not fond of CNN’s style of reporting, but it’s not so much that I feel like they’ve got a bias as it is that they seem so desperate to prove they don’t have a bias that they never challenge anyone on anything, ever. A CNN interview with Charles Manson would go something like this:

CNN Reporter: “Mr. Manson, your followers murdered seven people, including a woman who was almost nine months pregnant, and planned to murder others. Do you think that maybe this is something you should apologize for?”

Manson: “No.”

CNN Reporter: “I see. Now, regarding your relationship with Brian Wilson…”

But none of that is what depresses me. No, what depresses me are the ads. I’m not sure whether CNN just has unbelievably low standards, or whether the various advertisers have targeted CNN’s demographics with razor-sharp precision and realized that 99% of the people watching CNN at 1 in the afternoon are either gullible elderly folks or people out on workman’s comp, but watching the ads on CNN all day is like a non-stop bath in human misery. Easily half the ads feel like borderline scams (overpriced insurance, dubious financial advice, lawyers explaining to you how you can sue/outwit the IRS/get a free scooter, the occasional right-wing screed) and the rest drop the “borderline” part. One in particular, which apparently warns of the “END OF AMERICA” that this financial genius predicted, feels like it’s the work of someone about two steps ahead of the law.

And what’s most depressing is that all this is showing on a news network. In theory, at least, these people are devoted to the ideals of honesty. They have cultivated a reputation for trustworthiness, and these ads cloak themselves in that reputation in order to seem like they, too, can be trusted. But they so patently and obviously can’t that you find yourself pitying the poor soul who really does believe that they need term life insurance, or that they can make money by investing in gold, or that the Health Care Reform Bill is unconstitutional and Mike Huckabee really needs their help in repealing it before it’s Too Late. Because you know there are people like that out there, people who believe these ads because they’re on CNN and CNN wouldn’t lie to them. And that, my friends, is why I get depressed watching CNN.

Well, that and trying to imagine how inadequate Wolf Blitzer must feel that he needs to name his news show, “THE SITUATION ROOM”.

Fellow MGK contributor Matthew Johnson posted a couple of weeks ago about his undeniably unfilmable (but interesting) idea for a Doctor Who story, and the comments section turned towards everyone else’s idea for a Doctor Who story they probably couldn’t do. Which, in my case, has perhaps less to do with the story idea and more to do with the fact that I can’t really see the producers of Doctor Who accepting an unsolicited pitch from a novice screenwriter based on his blog post about the idea, but I’ve accepted a long time ago that I have no idea how to break into television. (Television studios, I can do. But that’s another story.)

My idea comes from noticing the pattern that the series has established over its first five seasons in its “Doctor Who meets a famous creative person” episodes (‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’, ‘Vincent and the Doctor’.) The creative person runs afoul of a menace that is peculiarly fitted to their creative endeavors, with a Doctor Who twist (Dickens meets alien “ghosts”, Shakespeare fights evil witches from another dimension, Agatha Christie wanders into a murder mystery that involves space wasps, and Vincent van Gogh discovers aliens that, due to his unique perception, only he can see.) The menace brings the creative person to a personal low, even as the Doctor finds himself unable to thwart it; he succeeds by using praise to bring out the creative person’s unique gifts, allowing them to defeat the menace in a way the Doctor can’t. Finally, the Doctor reveals a hidden truth to the creative person: Their gifts are unique and their works will endure throughout eternity.

Naturally, I had to subvert the formula.

In this story, the Doctor and Amy wind up in England, in 1844. The politician and author Edward Bulwer-Lytton is at a personal low, having been forced out of Parliament, separated from his wife, and dealt with the death of his mother…and he’s not handling it well. In fact, he’s having a nervous breakdown, hearing voices that tell him to excavate a massive hole on his estate.

The Doctor finds this highly suspicious. Not because he thinks Edward is insane, but because the TARDIS is picking up high-end telepathic broadcasts that suggest he very much isn’t. He insinuates himself into Edward’s company in order to find out just what’s at the bottom of the hole, and isn’t surprised to find that it’s an alien race. The Vrilya, as they are called, came through from another dimension that was losing its cohesion, and when they escaped, well…beggars can’t be choosers. A portal to a maze of subterranean caverns, with no way up to the surface, still beat a world where the laws of physics were breaking down.

The Vrilya are angelic, intensely powerful, and bring with them a miracle substance that is the pinnacle of their technology, called “vril”. They plan to offer Edward, and by extension Britain, the substance in exchange for a path for the rest of their species to come through. With the prospect of all his shames and failures erased, Edward is sorely tempted.

But the Doctor realizes that vril is more dangerous than it appears. Its energies are actually the cause of the destabilization of the Vrilya’s home universe, and if they begin using vril in large quantities on Earth the way they did back home, well…”unmitigated disaster” barely begins to describe it. The Vrilya don’t take well to what they see as a death sentence for their people (they see life without the miracle of vril as a fate worse than death) and use their powers to banish the Doctor to their universe.

But the Doctor makes contact with Edward through the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits (the ones that let him instantly understand any language.) He convinces Edward that his mind is receptive to the Vrilya, but that link works both ways–he needs to open himself up completely to the Vrilya, let them see the fullness of the human condition as expressed through the mind of one of its most celebrated authors. Startled back to normality by the Doctor’s praise, Edward does so…and unexpectedly, the Vrilya flee back to their home dimension. The Doctor pops out as they pop back in, relieved to be back. “Where did they go?” asks Amy, who really hasn’t had much to do in this episode. “Oh, probably off to try again somewhere else. Anywhere the portals can open. Anywhere that’s not here.”

“And my works, Doctor?” Edward asks. “Will they endure? Will I be remembered, in ages hence?” The Doctor smiles thinly, and assures Edward that the name Bulwer-Lytton will be famous for centuries to come. But unlike Vincent, he decides not to give him a ride in the TARDIS to show him exactly how…

I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)

And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.

So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.

But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.

And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.

It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)

When I last blogged about this season of “The Amazing Race”, it had just premiered, and I gave some preliminary thoughts on the racers and the series. I got a few things very right (“Brook and Claire seem nice enough, but I think they’re this season’s token “Teams That OD on the Adrenalin Rush and Chest Bump After Every Small Accomplishment”) and a few things very wrong (“Nick and Vicki will be gone next week”)…but looking back, what do I think now that they’re down to the top four?

For starters, I stand by my assertion that the more the racers drive themselves around, the less interesting the race gets. Gary and Mallory’s elimination was almost entirely without suspense, despite the best efforts of the Race’s editing team, because when you spend nine hours driving around looking for the first clue, it’s a pretty good bet that everyone else gets a free pass to the next leg. Admittedly, taxi roulette isn’t much better, as Andie and Jenna found, but I think that maybe the challenges need to be a little more challenging in order to give late racers a chance to catch up. There have only been a few really tricky challenges this year; most have them have been time-consuming in a way that doesn’t allow the racers’ skills to give them a chance to shave off much time. A task that takes everyone an hour is a task that might as well not be there.

Still, there have been some good innovations. The Double U-Turn changed the U-Turn from a “fuck you, you’re eliminated” to a real race-leveling tool; since two teams got stuck with it, you were still racing against someone on the same terms as you. I still don’t feel any need to have the U-Turners need to put up their picture itself–I think it creates Drama in one of the few reality shows that’s a lot of fun even when it’s totally Drama-free–but if someone really feels like holding a grudge against the person who U-Turned them instead of going after the strongest competition, I can’t stop them.

As to the remaining racers…well, I’m thrilled beyond belief that Chad and Stephanie are gone. I was seriously starting to think of them as the cockroaches of the Amazing Race, thoroughly unpleasant and yet somehow surviving everything that was thrown at them. I was slightly saddened that Gary/Mallory and Michael/Kevin got eliminated, since they seemed to be having fun with the Race (and doing better than most parent/child teams do) but such is life. And now, I’d like to see Jill/Thomas and Nick/Vicki gone, or at the very least not winning the Race. Both guys are nasty and mean to their girlfriends (especially Nick, who really does behave like he’d like to hit Vicki if the cameras weren’t on them) and I don’t want to see them anymore. But with three episodes left (I’m guessing that this week will end with a split leg) I still can’t say I know who will win. Which is at least one thing they’re doing right.

Kurt Russell is one of those actors who will probably never win an Academy Award, not even one of those special “Lifetime Achievement” awards they hand out when the Academy suddenly looks up and realizes, “Oh, shit! So-and-so has never won an Oscar?” He doesn’t take the right parts to be an Oscar-winning actor. While other actors are playing tortured poets or tortured soldiers or tortured gunslingers, Kurt Russell is always refreshingly angst-free. He’s the kind of guy who is always having fun, whether playing a super-hero or a fugitive or a trucker caught up in a struggle between ancient Chinese sorcerers, and he’s not afraid to let everyone know it.

And that’s what makes him an Unsung Hero. The sense of fun that Kurt Russell brings to every role he plays is infectious. While he’s on screen, you frequently find yourself smiling almost before you realize it; it’s something about his delivery, perhaps, the way that he drawls out each line with just enough of an accent to make you wonder whether he’s parodying John Wayne or whether he really talks like that. Or maybe it’s his body language, the way he seems to have just enough self-knowledge to play the Stallone-esque tough guy while letting the audience know he thinks it’s pretty silly, too. Or maybe it’s just the eyes. Watch Kurt Russell’s eyes when he’s on screen, and you’ll see it. He knows that this is a hell of a fun way to make a living.

Whatever it is, Kurt Russell makes movies fun. There has never been a movie so bad that it hasn’t perked up while Russell is on screen (“3000 Miles to Graceland” comes to mind)…and there have been a lot of cult classics that he’s made even better. “Escape From New York”, “The Thing”, “Big Trouble In Little China”, “Overboard”, “Tombstone”, “Stargate”, “Executive Decision”, “Sky High”, “Death Proof”…none of them art films, all of them what would probably be sniffed at by critics as ‘crowd-pleasers’, but all of them quite successful at pleasing crowds. Why? Because Kurt Russell’s in them. And he’s just damn fun to watch.

So let’s join together as geeks and give a big round of applause for Kurt Russell, an actor who knows that movies should be fun to watch.

We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.

And I have gone from barely noticing the existence of the series to watching it religiously (it became a tradition over the course of my long-distance, long-term relationship to watch it while on the phone with each other. You may now awwww or ewwwww, according to preference.) The new season started tonight. So what did I think?

First, the teams. In the order they finished…Jill and Thomas managed to be this year’s “Team That Doesn’t Stick In Your Mind At All”. It’ll be several legs (assuming they survive) before I remember anything about them at all. I see them as a middle of the pack finisher, despite the fact that they won the big “Express Pass” prize this leg. I think they’re competent, which will let them survive while the terrible teams wash out, but I don’t think they’ll go hugely far. Then again, I thought the same thing about Brent and Caite last time. Then again, I also thought the top three of that Race would have finished middle of the pack any other season.

Nat and Kat, I think, are going to do very well. They’re used to the killer stress and killer fatigue that screw teams over hard in the later legs of the Race, and they seem to generally have their heads together overall. They impressed in every area on this leg, and while that’s not necessarily a predictor, it’s a good sign. It’d be nice to see them as the first all-female team to win the Race.

Connor and Jonathan got the nickname “The Ducklings” within about fifteen minutes in our house. Like ducklings, they are adorable and sweet. And like ducklings, you figure that they have a lifespan of about five minutes without someone looking after them. Seriously, forget coming in last, I expected them to wind up in a ditch somewhere outside of London, tied up with their own underwear. They surprised me by doing well in the actual challenges, but I get the feeling these guys are in way over their heads.

Brook and Claire seem nice enough, but I think they’re this season’s token “Teams That OD on the Adrenalin Rush and Chest Bump After Every Small Accomplishment”. (Think “Drive it like you stole it.”) I definitely admire their fortitude in the face of the now-infamous “Watermelon Money Shot”, and I think they’ll probably be in it pretty close to the end, but I see their personalities as grating on me by about Week Six.

I was not enamored by the way Katie and Rachel decided to come up with derogatory nicknames for all the other teams, and it definitely soured me on a duo that I think also has a pretty good chance to finish high in the standings. But we’ll see. Maybe that was just a bad first impression. (But come on, they were snarking at the Ducklings! How can you possibly be cruel to little babies like that!)

Gary and Mallory feel like that very nice parent/child team that gets into the Race to be heartwarming and bond across the generation gap, and then finds out about three weeks in that this shit be hard, man. I don’t think they’re doomed, necessarily, but I think they’re not top three material.

The same is true for Michael and Kevin, except they’re funnier to watch and they’ll probably get another couple million hits for their website.

Chad and Stephanie cannot get eliminated soon enough. CAN. NOT. Every Race seems to have one bickering asshole couple with a guy who really thinks that fuming, pouting, screaming and whining is the sure-fire communications technique to motivate their partner. (And they all seem to get into it to “help improve their relationship”. Yes, because putting the two of you into an intense stress situation that you can spend the rest of your lives blaming each other over the failure to win large sums of money is clearly much better than couples therapy.) Please, please, please please please let them not last more than two more weeks.

Andie and Jenna…hoo boy. This could either be a spectacular train wreck, or a really touching experience for them. Me, I’d have met my birth mom for coffee or something, but I have to admit that while they didn’t do well (and I think they’ll probably be middle of the pack overall) they seemed to get along, so it might be heading for some real happy moments for them. Which might be worth more than a million dollars, as far as they’re concerned.

Nick and Vicki will be gone next week. They didn’t know anything about other countries, they didn’t know how to find landmarks, they didn’t know how to figure out challenges, they couldn’t even figure out what a boat was on the first try. They are the token Stupid Couple, and it was only luck that let them survive the first leg. (And yes, I know. Jeff and Jordan were last season’s Stupid Couple, and they made it to seventh place. See above comment on last year’s crop of contestants being extraordinarily weak.)

And Ron and Tony…tough luck. I know I’m in the minority in my household, but I don’t really care much for the contestants having to drive themselves. Yes, part of the Race is finding your way around strange places, and yes, it cuts down on the “taxi roulette” problem (contestants getting incompetent or super-competent drivers and getting a huge detriment/boost to their finish in that leg)…but on the other hand, lots of scenes of people driving around asking for directions are boring, the episode loses tension if you know that one or two teams are so far behind because they’re lost that the others stand no chance of being eliminated, and it really kind of sucks that some teams don’t get the chance to show how well or poorly they could have done in the challenges because they took a wrong turn on the M25 and got eliminated.

As for the episode itself…definitely a harsh opening in terms of the above-mentioned driving challenges. Opening with “Find your way through Boston to Logan Airport” and closing with, “Now find your way from Heathrow Airport to various spots in the British countryside” is pretty much the Olympics of competitive driving, and it’s no surprise that even the top finishers spent a lot of time asking for directions. (Which, again, boring.) The challenges were great, though. Top-notch, with enough real challenge to them that teams could actually change position based on how well they did. (A challenge that fails, in my mind, is one where everyone walks out of it in the order they walked in. There should be enough difficulty to reward competence.) The coracles, in particular, were good stuff–something about the way a coracle sinks, straight down instead of tipping, perfectly exemplifies the concept of “epic fail”.

Overall, this seems like a pretty strong field of contenders, a pretty well-designed Race, and I’m looking forward to next week! (Note: Follow to my blog, Fraggmented, for a joke I thought was too geeky to put here.)

Nobody has arguments like Doctor Who fans have arguments. There, I’ve said it and I’m not going to take it back. Sure, “Trek” fans have their “Kirk vs. Picard” debates. Yes, “Buffy” fans constantly argue about whether Angel or Spike is Buffy’s One True Love. (Riley never gets a fair shake in those debates.) And sure, “Battlestar Galactica” fans constantly argue about whether the ending of their series was incoherent gibberish, or whether the entire series was just as awful. (I assume.) But Doctor Who fans? We have arguments older than a good percentage of the audience. We have arguments that actually get summed up in books. “Which Doctor is better, Four or Ten?” That barely even scratches the surface. Here’s a quick guide to the big Doctor Who arguments, the evidence for and against each side, and the episodes you can watch to start forming your own irrational opinions.

1) UNIT Dating. When Jon Pertwee took over as the Doctor from Patrick Troughton, it was accompanied by a radical shift in the series’ format. Instead of traveling to alien worlds with his companions to fight monsters, the Doctor was exiled to Earth sans TARDIS, and fought monsters right there in Britain alongside UNIT (a United Nations division tasked with investigating the strange and unusual.)

At the time, the publicity materials announced that this was to be the England of the near-future, and the technology is certainly more advanced than the era in which it was made. (Britain has a fully-fledged space program in “The Ambassadors of Death”, there’s a female Prime Minister in “Terror of the Zygons”, and similar bits of anachronistic tech and unusual fashion.) But clearly, making the series “futuristic” was not in the front of the mind of the production team, and they missed a lot of things that clearly dated the series to the era it was filmed in. (You can see pre-decimal currency signs in shops, they mention Mao Zedong in the present tense, and most of the fashions and all of the haircuts scream “70s”.) By the time the series revisited the era, in the mid-80s, they had totally forgotten about the “future” aspect and set a date for the Brigadier’s retirement in 1977. (Meaning all UNIT stories had to take place before then.) This clearly conflicts with companion Sarah Jane’s comment in “Pyramids of Mars” that she’s from 1980. Only one of these can be right. Pick a side and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, and you’re set!

2) Are the Spin-offs Canon? At the time it came out, the book “No Future” seemed to settle the “UNIT Dating” issue by showing the events that led to the Brigadier’s retirement and setting them in 1976. When the book was published, moreover, the TV series was on an indefinite hiatus and the books were the officially licensed continuation of the show. But then, in 1996, FOX came out with a TV movie that picked up the story with the Seventh Doctor’s regeneration. The books gamely rallied, filling the gap between the novels and the TV movie and continuing on with the new adventures of the Eighth Doctor, but then…

In 1999, Big Finish Productions obtained the rights to do audio plays for Doctor Who. They set up their own competing Eighth Doctor series that became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the books, and canon wars started over which was the “true” timeline. Then, to complicate things further, the TV series came back as well. The TV show has adapted some of the book and audio stories, seemingly rendering them “non-canonical”, but has explicitly contradicted very little of the information in either (about the same amount as it has of the old TV show. Doctor Who creative teams don’t tend to have the same priorities as the fans.) So at the moment, the books and audios are in limbo. There have been clever attempts to work around this (involving the Land of Fiction, or alternate realities) but none of them have been satisfying.

3) Is the Eighth Doctor Half-Human? (Much thanks to my girlfriend for reminding me about this one.) When the TV movie came out in 1996, it was…not entirely well-received, to put it mildly. There were a lot of people who tried to deny that it had ever happened at all, even as he went on to star in seventy-nine novels and sixty or so audio plays. They finally acknowledged the canonicity of the TV movie when the new series showed him in flashback as one of the “official” Doctors, but they continue to insist that the TV movie can’t be an accurate representation of the events of his regeneration. Why? Because the Eighth Doctor, in a moment of either unprecedented honesty or mad whimsy, mentions to a scientist that he’s half-human. (On his mother’s side.)

This is not something Doctor Who fans like. It contradicts a lot of the canon established in the books (but see above.) It establishes the Doctor as part of a biological family, which means that his parents–and quite possibly the Doctor himself–might have squishy bits that they enjoy using (but see below.) And it’s a staggeringly stupid sci-fi cliche which offers no storytelling possibilities at all. Everyone seemed to have agreed not to mention it…until Russell T Davies’ grand finale to his era as Doctor Who showrunner, where he introduced a mysterious Woman In White, who had an unspoken but deep connection to the Doctor and who he recognized as a Time Lord. And she also had a mysterious, unspoken connection to Bernard Cribbins’ character, who could see her and who the Doctor described as someone he’d be proud to have as a dad. Mutated version of the TV movie’s “half-human” idea? Or terrible plot cul-de-sac to be buried forever? You decide!

4) Does the Doctor Have Sex? There’s certainly no on-screen evidence. Sure, he’s surrounded by nubile young women, and sure, the new series seems to show him all lovey-dovey in a chaste fashion. And sure, he mentions that he was a father, and sure, back in the very first episode, he was traveling with his grand-daughter…but does that mean he has sex?

A lot of fans say “no”. They feel that sex is a distinctly human quality, and part of the Doctor’s essential “alien-ness” is that he doesn’t show much, if any, interest in sex. (The classic line, from Douglas Adams’ script for “City of Death”: “Well, you’re a beautiful woman, probably…”) For a big contingent of fans, the Doctor even functions as an iconic gay sci-fi hero. Sure, he doesn’t overtly snog guys, but at the same time, most of his female relationships have a certain “Will and Grace” quality to them. These fans have come up with some fairly elaborate rationales for the presence of biological relatives like Susan (see below) and ignore everything but the most blatant evidence of sex. (They ignore the most blatant evidence, too.)

5) Lives Before Hartnell. The same rationale that explains Susan’s existence in a fairly convoluted fashion (look up “Lungbarrow” if you want to know) also explains away one of the most tantalizing bits of fanservice in the series: The extra faces you see in “The Brain of Morbius”. See, the Doctor and Morbius (an evil Time Lord who tried to conquer the universe from exile, and was reduced to a brain in a jar) have a “brain-bending” duel, where they’re placed in direct telepathic contact and try to regress each other’s minds to infancy. The regressed lives are shown as faces on a handy screen, and it seems like Morbius handily pushes the Doctor back through his third, second, and first incarnation…and then eight more faces appear on the screen before Morbius’ brain explodes from the strain. The production team at the time claimed that these were intended to be pre-Hartnell incarnations, suggesting several lifetimes’ adventures before “An Unearthly Child”. Every subsequent production team has ignored this, setting clear limits on the number of Time Lord incarnations, specifying their order, and establishing Hartnell as the first.

And yet, like the “Paul Is Dead” myth, this one will not die. Believers of the pre-Hartnell theory come up with elaborate explanations as to how the Doctor could have lived more than thirteen lives, pointing to the Fifth/Thirteenth Doctor’s cryptic dialogue (“I might regenerate…feels different, this time…”) and the erratic post-regenerative personality of the Sixth Doctor as hints that the regeneration was a truly unique event that has yet to be explained. (These people are insane. Argue with them at your peril.)

Those are the top five, but there are undoubtedly a ton I missed. Forty-seven years of continuity will generate that sort of thing. Feel free to mention yours in the comments!

Frankly, I don’t blame you. It’s the longest running science-fiction series in the history of television, having gone on longer than every single Star Trek series put together. It’s featured the writing of Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and television luminary Steven Moffat (who looked like he was going to corner the market on Hugo awards for a few years there.) It’s smart, witty, fun, inventive, fearlessly silly and gobsmackingly terrifying all at the same time, and generally the best thing since sliced bread. But with a TV show that’s coming close to celebrating its 50th anniversary, where do you start?

Really, the wonderful thing about the series is that there are any number of jumping-on points. The show is not a “Lost”-type experience where you have to pay deep attention to the mythos and every story builds on the story before it. (In fact, it’s almost the opposite; with so many changes to the show’s creative personnel, it was pretty frequent for series writers to have to rely on second- or third-hand descriptions of older stories when they brought back recurring enemies. This is why compiling timelines of Doctor Who is a fan cottage industry.)

But probably the best jumping-on point, right now, is Season One of the new series. The first episode, “Rose”, shows the Doctor from the perspective of someone meeting him for the first time, and gives you a nice initiation into the basic concept of the series (although the best description of the basic concept comes later, in Steven Moffat’s introductory episode “The Eleventh Hour”: “Amy Pond, there’s something you’d better understand about me, because it’s important, and one day your life may depend upon it. I am definitely a madman with a box.”) From there, it’s pretty easy to find yourself moving on to Seasons 2, 3, 4, the 2009 specials, and 5…although honestly, I think that big chunks of 3 and 4 are skippable if you don’t feel like watching everything. (Make sure to watch “Blink”, though. Everyone should watch “Blink”, if for nothing else than to see Carey Mulligan in one of her early TV appearances. She’s gonna be huge.)

But the thing is, as much as I like it, the new series is only the tip of the Doctor Who iceberg. There’s twenty-six seasons and a whopping 286 novels out there, not to mention the comics, audio plays and movies. (The movies are just adaptations of two early TV stories. You can skip them if you want, although it’s neat to see Peter Cushing playing the Doctor.) While you certainly don’t have to see it all…and in fact, you can’t, thanks to the BBC’s short-sighted decision to erase several early stories from their archives…there are a few good places to start in. I’ll list eleven, in honor of the eleven Doctors (although not necessarily featuring them all.) One thing, though. It’s worth noting that the classic series was filmed a long time ago, and usually on a shoestring budget. If you have a low tolerance for terrible special effects, run don’t walk in the other direction.

1. Genesis of the Daleks. The origin of the Daleks (although not their first appearance) and the first appearance of Davros, their mad creator. Also features the most popular (and arguably the best) Doctor, Tom Baker, whose floppy hat and long scarf provide some of the iconic images of the series.

2. An Unearthly Child. The very first episode; it actually holds up pretty well as a piece of drama, although you’ll find yourself wondering exactly who Susan’s grandmother was and why we never hear about the Doctor’s family ever again. This is normal, and part of your initiation into the world of Doctor Who fandom.

3. Spearhead From Space. This story doesn’t actually introduce UNIT, the military organization that helps the Doctor frequently over the course of his travels, but it does introduce the era of the series where they were most prominent (and the era where the Doctor was trapped on Earth.) It also introduces the Autons, occasional recurring enemies of the Doctor.

4. The Deadly Assassin. Likewise, this story doesn’t actually introduce the Master, the Doctor’s arch-nemesis and fellow renegade Time Lord, but it’s easily the best story with the character and introduces his rationale for most of the later era of the series (he’s used up all his regenerations and is trying to find a way to prolong his existence.)

5. The War Games. Basically, it’s the origin story for the Doctor, but it’s also a clever story in its own right. The Doctor seems to materialize in World War One, but at every twist, the story grows in scope until he has no choice but to reveal his past and go to his own people, the Time Lords, for help in restoring order. (Pack a lunch…it’s a ten-parter.)

6. The Chimes of Midnight. This is one of the better stories in the audio spin-off line from Big Finish, and also one of the stories that’s emblematic of the Eighth Doctor’s run in the audios. His impulsive decision to rescue “Edwardian adventuress” Charley from certain death aboard the R-101 has catastrophic consequences to history, and this story is a perfect example. Plus, it’s chillingly clever and a mix of humor and horror that sticks with you for a long time after the story ends. “Edward Grove is alive.”

7. Human Nature. At last, a chance to use links! This classic Doctor Who novel is also available as a free ebook at the BBC’s website, and it’s one of the best things Paul Cornell (who you might have heard of from the Pete Wisdom or Captain Britain comics) has ever written. It was later adapted for TV, but the book is better. Also features one of the stronger appearances of Cornell-created companions Bernice Summerfield, who wound up with her own spin-off series of some thirty novels and a similar number of audio plays. (River Song, from the new series, is basically a slightly-less awesome version of Bernice.)

8. Spare Parts. Another audio play, this one featuring TV’s Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. It’s also the origin of the Cybermen, who comprise, alongside the Daleks and the Master, the Doctor’s main Rogue’s Gallery. (In general, the Doctor’s Rogue’s Gallery consists of entire species, not individuals. Individual bad guys who fight the Doctor have a tendency to wind up dead.)

9. The Two Doctors. This is one of the more watchable adventures of the Sixth Doctor, but it gives you a pretty good idea of the kinds of excesses and problems that were afflicting the series around then. Colin Baker tries hard, but script editor Eric Saward undercuts everything with his vision of the series, and producer John Nathan-Turner viewed his job more as drumming up publicity for the series than actually making it watchable. Oh, and it’s got the Sontarans in it. See one Sontaran, you’ve seen ‘em all (literally, they’re a race of clones.)

10. City of Death. The Doctor Who episode every Doctor Who fan shows to non-Doctor Who fans, this is the one written by Douglas Adams, with Julian Glover as the villain (you know Julian Glover, even if you don’t remember the name; he’s been a villain for James Bond, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Harry Potter) and the cameo by John Cleese. If you can only watch one of the stories on this list, this is probably the one.

11. Remembrance of the Daleks. The last Dalek appearance in the classic series, and probably the best; this features three of the all-time classic headfucks of Doctor Who. The first is the Dalek chasing the Doctor up the flight of stairs for the first time in series history, the second is the appearance of the “Special Weapons Dalek” (which must be seen to be believed), and the third…but that would be telling.

So there you go, a potted guide to Doctor Who! It’s by no means complete, but I hope I’ve given you a good place to start. That’s all for this week…but I did want to beg everyone’s indulgence for a moment, and mention that I’ve started my own T-shirt store on CafePress. Feel free to stop by and see if there’s anything you like!

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–”Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

It’s a deceptively simple question: When exactly did ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, the series, end? To some, of course, the answer is, “It didn’t.” Dark Horse Comics has already announced a Season Nine to come after the conclusion of the comics-only Season Eight, and the same people who wrote for the TV series are clearly enjoying the upsides of writing a Buffy series with an unlimited budget and no worries about actor availability. That’s ‘Buffy’ in some form, definitely.

But to others, ‘Buffy’ ended when the series left television. Seven seasons, two networks, 144 episodes, no writing Emmys. Certainly, the facts argue in favor of that interpretation; ‘Buffy’ Season Seven features the same core cast as Season One, the same basic setting, even the same theme music. But Season One was about a teenage girl who was trying to make it through the metaphorical hell of high school while simultaneously trying to stop demons from the literal mouth of Hell, while Season Seven was about…um, a twenty-two year old woman looking for a career, and a bad guy who couldn’t do anything but make vague menacing threats, and Andrew for some damned reason. They’re set in the same place, they feature the same people, but they don’t feel like the same series when set side by side. Only because we watched the transformation as it slowly occurred does it feel seamless to us.

So when did ‘Buffy’, the show that started in 1997 on the WB, end? Did it finish on the WB as well? It’d be hard to argue that, I think; Buffy as protective big sister/single parent to Dawn, working out of the Magic Box to battle demons alongside super-witch Willow and semi-redeemed vampire Spike, feels less like Season One than Season Seven did. (Not to mention Season Five marks the breaking point where the series ceases to be about people growing up and begins to be about people who have grown up and find their life really sucks and it’s not what they thought it’d be in high school and they’d really rather go back and be teenagers again…actually, Seasons Five through Seven really suck the joy out of re-watching Seasons One through Four. “Oh, aren’t Willow and Oz so cute together?” “Yeah, they go through a painful break-up later on, and then she becomes a lesbian and falls in love with this really sweet girl…who gets shot and killed.” One of the big problems with both ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ was that neither series knew when to stop bumping off supporting characters.)

So it’s Season Four, then. Except…as much as I love Season Four (and I do; I think it’s the last good season, and it’s got some of the best comedy episodes) it’s actually a much bigger break from Season Three than Five is from Four or Six from Five. It’s a change of setting, a big change of supporting cast (gone are Angel, Cordelia, Principal Snyder, Joyce, Jonathan and Oz as regulars, and in comes Riley, Maggie Walsh, Forrest, Graham, Tara, Spike and Anya as regulars) and a change of mission, too. Buffy and her friends aren’t teenagers dealing with teenage problems anymore. They’re grown-ups, learning what it’s like to be out in the wider world.

No, I think that you can safely set aside Seasons One through Three of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as a seamless whole, an epic story about how we become adults told through a prism of sorcery, horror, kung-fu, and witty quips. All of the themes introduced in the beginning of the series (“high school is hell”, “Buffy’s friends are assets to her Slaying and not liabilities”, “your first love might seem passionate and true and the deepest you’ll ever experience, but they’re not necessarily good for you and passion isn’t enough to sustain a relationship”, “growing up means making decisions for yourself instead of listening to authority figures”, “having true friends that stick with you through thick and thin is better than being powerful”) are wrapped up in dramatic and spectacular fashion in the season finale (the commencement speaker turns into a giant demon snake, Buffy rallies together the entire high school class to defeat it, Angel walks away afterward to let her find someone who can be happy with her, Buffy tells the Watchers to sod off because she doesn’t need a Watcher anymore, and the season ends with everyone together watching the flames and then walking away hand-in-hand.) Heck, the Season Three finale even ends with the suggestion that there’s no need to worry about the Hellmouth anymore: the last line of the episode is, “Why do demons even come here anymore?” What could be more series finale than that?

‘Buffy’, as we finally saw it, is a genuinely great piece of television. But the first three seasons are the true ‘Buffy’ because they’re the execution of the central concept, a great idea turned into a magnificent series that ended just like it needed to. After that, it’s just a matter of following the character around while she lives her life, and frankly that’s not the same thing as telling a story. Buffy might keep fighting evil forever, but ‘Buffy’ ended the day she got her diploma.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of Inception (including the one here) and a lot of thoughts on Inception (including the one here just a little bit ago, which is quite a nice theory. Me, I tend to go for the straightforward ambiguity of “either the ending is entirely real, or else everything up to the ending is real and it’s only the last few minutes that are a dream”. But I do like the idea that Matthew Johnson put forward…and I like that the movie is more ambiguous than the heist flick it seems to be on the surface.)

But the most common negative I hear about the movie is summed up by one of the comments in Matthew Johnson’s post (thank you, Snap Wilson, for inspiring this post, by the way): “Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling. Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.”

This is the big complaint most of the people who disliked Inception had, that the dreams didn’t feel like dreams. (In fairness to Wilson, he said he liked the film despite that.) But I think those people are…not missing the point, because I think that’s kind of mean. Perhaps they’re approaching it from the wrong angle, or approaching it without key knowledge. Nolan isn’t making a film about dreams. Nolan is making a film about lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of experiencing a dream with the knowledge that you are experiencing a dream, and using that knowledge to “steer” the dream and control its contents. The result is something like an astonishingly vivid narrative, like living out a movie. (Yes, the parallels are obvious. Nolan is clearly fascinated with the subject; after all, he apparently worked on the screenplay to Inception for something like a decade. You don’t do that with something you’re not obsessed with.)

Lucid dreams feel very different from normal dreams; there’s less of the disconnected dream-logic, the bizarre and senseless structure that comes from synapses firing randomly. You feel like you’re in a real place, talking to real people. There’s a narrative to it…and it’s one you can control. Does this begin to sound familiar? Lucid dreamers even develop strategies to determine whether or not they’re dreaming, although not the same ones as in the movie. (They do things like look at a digital clock, look away, then quickly look back again. In a dream, the numbers don’t stay the same.)

That was where Nolan’s idea for Inception began. The film takes that initial, real-world idea of lucid dreaming, and asks, “What might happen if lucid dreamers could share their dreams?” And then takes it to the next step, “If a lucid dreamer controlled the dreams of a normal dreamer, how would they know it wasn’t their idea?” And then inserts gangsters, corporate espionage, and guys with machine guns and grenade launchers, which is never a bad direction to take a film. The people who point out that Inception doesn’t replicate a normal dream are right…but then again, it’s not trying to.