While I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post (they don’t all spring fully-formed as though from the brow of Zeus, y’know…actually, it’d be pretty creepy to have a kid that way. You’d be sitting there, getting these headaches that get worse and worse, wondering if you have some sort of tumor…and bam! Suddenly your head explodes and a fully-grown woman crawls out, soaked in gore. Hell, that sounds more like a Cronenberg movie than a Greek myth.)

Um…anyway, while I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post, I was toying with the idea of coming up with a “Defenders” movie to match the upcoming “Avengers” movie, on the grounds that it would be kind of, y’know, cool to see it happen. Except, of course, that we still haven’t gotten a Doctor Strange or Namor movie, and that the Silver Surfer’s rights are being held by different people from the Hulk’s rights, and he’s only ever been a supporting character in the FF movies anyway, and the whole rationale for the Surfer joining the rest of them doesn’t make sense in the movie continuity…

And then I proceeded to “…and anyway, it’s not like that was a very good incarnation of the team to begin with, even though it’s the version everybody tries rebooting when they reboot the Defenders, and frankly it’s not like the series ever had the same popularity as the Avengers in the first place, and it’s actually kind of a fundamentally flawed team dynamic…” and it occurred to me that maybe a post dissecting the Defenders’ flaws would be a little bit more interesting than a “Hey, you know who would be a cool Namor? Benedict Cumberbatch!” post. (Although he would.)

So let’s talk about the Defenders as a concept. Because I don’t think anyone has ever really sat down and done it, with the possible exception of Steve Gerber (who always struck me as a more intuitive writer anyway.) The original idea of the Defenders, and the original team line-up, was that it was going to be the opposite of the Avengers. This was going to be a team of the guys who weren’t straight-arrows, who weren’t team players, who weren’t the guys who would love to hang out together and bicker about who was going to be on monitor duty that week. These guys would be dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t work. Dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas do not, by definition, work together as a team. At least, not for the kind of long-term purposes that you need for an ongoing series. Sure enough, the first few issues are full of phrases like, “This is the last time I work with you three,” and “Only because the fate of the world is at stake,” and “As much as I hate the rest of you, I’ll help…this time.” Within a few issues, Namor and the Silver Surfer had departed for good.

Which led to the next, more interesting incarnation of the team. Instead of focusing on the “the Avengers are team players and we’re not” aspect, writers (particularly Steve Gerber) focused on the “the Avengers are socially acceptable and we’re not” angle. The Hulk and Doctor Strange stuck around, with Doctor Strange acting as a sort of counter-culture Tony Stark and the Hulk as a none-too-bright Thor substitute. Nighthawk completed the trio by being a whiny, insecure anti-Captain America, and other characters joined and left as needed. This concept lasted for the best part of the series 150-issue run, even as the characters who made it up came and went. (Although it should be noted that the version that didn’t have Doctor Strange or the Hulk lasted about twenty-five issues. As awesome as the Beast was, he just couldn’t make up for the lack of an A-list star in sales terms. The “New Defenders” line-up was roughly akin to the “Justice League Detroit” era, if you don’t mind me cross-company-izing my analogies for a moment.)

Subsequent relaunches, though, have focused on reuniting the “classic” Defenders line-up (as previously mentioned.) This doesn’t work now any better than it did in the beginning; the Hulk is still bad-tempered and quick to anger, the Sub-Mariner is still a bi-polar jerk with his own agenda, and the Silver Surfer still sees Earth as a cross between a prison and an insane asylum (and one that he’s escaped anyway.) The series just doesn’t work with the classic Defenders line-up, and that’s all there  is to it. What’s needed is a Defenders team that reunites the best aspects of the classic team, keeps the core concept of “counter-culture heroes” but has enough popular A-listers to make the book a success. Doctor Strange is a good start, but you need more heroes that are popular in the real world but disliked within the Marvel Universe. Heroes that are team players, but that don’t get much respect from their fellow supers. Heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine, maybe Power Man and Iron Fist, maybe a borderline socially-acceptable hero like Hawkeye…

Sound familiar? Yep, it’s the Avengers line-up we had up until just a couple years ago. Despite the “Avengers” name, it’s actually the kind of Defenders line-up that most of the classic-Defender-era writers would have killed for. It’s the kind of line-up that would make a good series and maybe bring some respect to the team, make them into the kind of heroes that really would get their own movie.

Except that, y’know, the people who own the rights to Doctor Strange still aren’t the same people as the ones who have the rights to Wolverine and Spider-Man…

We can all agree now that it was crap, right?

I don’t mean in the purely aesthetic sense; it was pretty obvious even at the time that this was a 64-page special padded out to seven issues of thin, underplotted gruel with Millar’s penchant for pithy one-liners and macho posturing substituting for actual story and characterization, and with a hamfisted 9/11 analogy that seemed simultaneously trite and tasteless even at the time and now looks just unforgivably crass. I mean that since all that was a given, we had to rely on it being not so much a “good” story as an “important” one, a change to the status quo of the Marvel Universe that would resonate for decades in the same way as ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ altered the shape of the DC Universe. (Which was, after all, what Millar promised. Sure, there was some hype there; after all, that was pretty much what Stan Lee promised for every issue of every title back in the Sixties.)

Then again, Stan Lee delivered on that promise to some degree. The characters he and Kirby and Ditko and others created stood the test of time as original, ground-breaking, and genuinely unpredictable. Whereas five years later…let’s look at the “massive, enduring changes to the Marvel Universe” and see how they stood up, shall we?

continue reading "Civil War, Five Years On"

There has come to be something of a debate over the last few days over the morality of the Doctor’s actions in the opening two-parter of Season Six. It’s something I really want to talk about, to the point that I’m posting a day early to weigh in on it (since I just posted a piece about The Incredibles in my own blog and I don’t want to push it down the page right away.) And since Season Six is so recent, I’m going to quarantine the whole thing behind the cut so that people who haven’t seen “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” can remain unspoiled. Then I’m going to point out some things to those who feel that this is out-of-character cruelty from the Doctor.

continue reading "On Moral Culpability In ‘Doctor Who’"

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!'”

Last month, io9 did a “March Madness” competition in which they did head-to-head polls of the popularity of 64 different movies, then pitted the winners against each other repeatedly until “The Empire Strikes Back” went up against “Serenity” for the title of…and even before I’m describing it, the analogy breaks down. “Best Sci-Fi Movie”? I don’t think anyone involved really thinks that these two films represent the pinnacle of the genre. (Actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as the “science fiction genre”, but that’s a rant for another time.) “Most Popular”? Among a subset of a subset of a subset of science-fiction fans, perhaps. So why do some people feel the need to vote in these popularity contests? Why do we feel the need to rank these movies? What is, in short, going on here?

I think that at heart, it comes from something we, as geeks, try very hard to pretend isn’t true: We need validation. We like to think that we’ve gotten used to finding enjoyment in the obscure and the esoteric, that we don’t care whether anyone else likes it as long as we do…and to some extent, that’s not entirely untrue. I have long ago accepted that my unquestioning adoration of “Jason X” and “Mortal Kombat” and “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” is never going to be reciprocated by even other sci-fi fans, and I’m okay with that. (You don’t know what you’re missing.)

But nonetheless, there is that need. The need to show that we are right in loving our favorite films, that it’s not just us but everyone who understands the appeal of Joss Whedon’s film masterwork. Even more than that, there’s the need to prove that we’re in the majority. (There’s a certain perverse brilliance to the way geeks handle popularity. Instead of desperately trying to join the “in” crowd, we desperately try to prove that the “in” crowd is the crowd we’re already “in”. With statistical data to back it up, too!)

It’s not the worst thing in the world, of course. (Taking it all seriously, on the other hand, is. The comment boards on io9 were filled with utter, incoherent nerdrage at the fact that Whedonites cheated, or that “Blade Runner” is clearly the best film ever made and it’s a shame that modern sci-fi fans don’t appreciate its greatness, or that none of the sixty-four films are anything like as good as “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist”. Um, not that I’m admitting anything.) But it nonetheless amazes me how hard it is to escape that need for validation, how hard it is to just enjoy the things we enjoy and leave it at that.

Then I look at the ESPN Power Rankings and remind myself that competitive geekery isn’t limited to science-fiction.

Heroes:

A-List: A hero who is capable of sustaining their own series for an extended period of time (possibly more than one series, but at least one.) If they guest star, they are given major billing on the cover and their presence is usually intended to be a sales boost to the title. May be known to the general public, although this is not a requirement. They are almost immune to comic book death; if they do die, their books do not cease publication and the character returns from death in no more than five years. Examples: Superman, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Captain America.

B-List: A frequent recurring hero in their fictional universe, someone who is usually a regular in an ensemble book. They may or may not have gotten their own series, but usually have not been able to sustain one for more than about five years. They are generally popular, to the point where a casual observer might think them to be more popular than an A-list hero simply because of the clamor for them to get their own book. They make guest appearances on a fairly regular basis in other books, but are not always billed as such on the cover. They are relatively safe from comic book death, but they can die in major crossovers; however, they usually return within five years as well. Examples: Martian Manhunter, the Thing, the Beast, Guy Gardner.

C-List: These heroes usually enjoyed a brief spate of popularity at the beginning of their existence, only to fall out of favor with the comic reading public. They rarely appear in their fictional universe, and when they do, as often as not it’s simply to provide a “shocking” death in a major crossover. (C-list characters’ deaths are almost always permanent; if they do return, it’s most often with a different character bearing the same name/costume.) They are highly unlikely to get their own book or even to make regular appearances in other books; while they have their fans, they’re generally considered “cult” characters at best. Examples: Speedball/Penance, War Machine, Vigilante, Judomaster.

Villains:

A-List: These villains have lofty goals (world domination, destruction of the universe, unmitigated chaos) and the ability to achieve them. Their appearance is considered a significant event every time they show up, usually an occasion for serious difficulties for the hero and a major extended plotline is needed to defeat them. Heroes sometimes need help against A-list villains, and they can be the headliners of crossovers (but not always.) Their defeats will be less ignominious than other villains, and they may even have a few victories notched up on their belt. (Sometimes they wind up having their defeats explained away as the work of imposters, clones, or similar.) If they do die, it’s almost guaranteed that they will return from that state. Examples: Doctor Doom, Darkseid, Thanos, Lex Luthor.

B-List: These villains tend to have less interesting, more self-motivated goals (personal wealth and power, revenge against the hero or society, et cetera) and are of a lower level of power. They are still significant threats to the hero (although they become less so over time–it’s more likely for a B-list villain to become C-list than A-list) and they generally remain thematically tied to a single hero. They put up a good fight most of the time, and are still exciting to read about, but generally more because of their particular quirks and personality than because they present a major obstacle to the hero’s life. They are not immune to comic book death, but it’s generally presented as a major event when they die. Examples: Kraven the Hunter, the Abomination, Metallo, the Parasite.

C-List: These villains are usually hired out or serve as lackeys to more powerful villains; regardless of who they originally battled against, they now make appearances in any book where a “disposable” villain is called for. They do not present a significant threat to whatever hero they face, and indeed they usually wind up defeated in comically ignominious fashion; their power levels may or may not be low, but if they are powerful, they are not skilled enough to use their powers in a threatening fashion. They are frequently the targets of “edgy” heroes or other villains, who kill them to show how tough/uncompromising they are. If they are killed, as with C-list heroes, someone else usually winds up taking on their mantle. Examples: Plantman, the Constrictor, Terra-Man, Weather Wizard.

The big problem with One of the biggest problems with One of the many, many vast problems with the 2005 crossover ‘Infinite Crisis’ is the way that everyone acted so wildly out of character. And I do mean everyone: The series started with the premise that Alexander Luthor, posing as his…um, father-ish thing…Lex, has organized almost all the super-villains in the world into a single cohesive group by using their fear of being brainwashed like Doctor Light. Yes, that’s right, Black Adam, the guy who rips criminals in half, is standing up for a serial rapist. Oh, and Captain Nazi and the Penguin are working together on this one, and Psimon has decided he’s comfy being one of the rank-and-file, as has Doctor Sivana, and Chemo is just fine lying in wait until they’re ready for him, and Doctor Psycho has really toned it down to work with the group. Because that’s Doctor Psycho in a nutshell, a guy who’s really capable of restraining his baser impulses when needed.

And the heroes? Batman’s gone completely off the deep end into paranoia, creating a giant satellite to “watch over” Earth’s superhumans and make sure they don’t get up to any mischief. Unsurprisingly, it goes berserk and causes more problems than it solves. (Batman is never held culpable for the many, many deaths caused by his creation, of course.) Wonder Woman has become murderously ruthless (although the collected version retcons away her attempted murder of Mongul by changing the line, “What do you think I was going to do?” to “I was going to tie him up, what do you think I was going to do?” Future collections will change it to, “I was thinking about giving him a guided tour of our headquarters, followed by tea and crumpets and a sincere discussion of the ethical problems inherent in his behavior. Why, what did you think I was going to do?”) And Superman merely waffles, consumed with self-doubt over his hopes at making the world a better place.

Power Girl is captured by Alexander Luthor, and it turns out he’s working with…the Psycho-Pirate! But according to Alexander, he’s not using PP’s emotion control powers at all to influence the heroes! They’re just like that already, because of how imperfect the world is. Using the unbelievably powerful emotion-manipulator to manipulate the emotions of his allies and enemies to help his master plan along, why…it simply wouldn’t be sporting!

Obviously, the whole plot makes a lot more sense if you assume that Alexander is making use of the Psycho-Pirate to keep his army of murderous, treacherous, violent sociopaths from turning on each other, while turning the heroes against each other. But actually, you can go even further than that. Think about the last time you saw Alexander Luthor, Kal-L, and Earth-Prime Superboy, back in ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’. Did they really seem all that hateful, evil, and obsessed with bringing back the Multiverse? Why, no, they didn’t. Was there another character out there who was evil and obsessed with bringing back the Multiverse, one who’d actually tried it once before in Grant Morrison’s “Animal Man” run? Why, yes, I do believe there was.

‘Infinite Crisis’ makes the most sense if you work on the assumption that it was the Psycho-Pirate behind it all. He was the one who planted the seeds of obsession that grew in the exiles from the Multiverse, all in pursuit of his goal of making the universe the way he remembered it. Tragically, he wouldn’t live to see his success, as all his emotional manipulation couldn’t stop Black Adam from squishing his head like a grape. (Look, kids! Comics!) It still has a lot of problems as a series, but at least it makes sense on a fundamental level.

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!

The format war officially ended two years ago. Blu-Ray is the new standard of the land, every Wal-Mart and Best Buy has a dedicated Blu-Ray section, and prices are down to the point where the average person can afford them. So the question then becomes…do we actually need to care?

No, I’m serious. Set aside the automatic “but it’s an upgrade!” reaction that comes second nature to geeks. (I’m not saying I don’t have it too. I have a Blu-Ray player, and I don’t even have a hi-def TV to watch the discs on. Long story.) I’m asking whether we actually need a new format, now or ever. Sure, the picture quality is better. Put two TVs side by side, one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-Ray DVD, and people will be able to tell which one is which. But it’s not the same as the difference between VHS and DVD. It’s not between “okay” and “amazing”, it’s between “amazing” and “near-perfect”.

Do we need “near-perfect”, though? Already, some films are having problems being converted to Blu-Ray because the format is so perfect that you can see imperfections in the film used to shoot the original master edition. The differences are so small as to be almost subliminal. DVD is immersive enough; Blu-Ray improves, but can you put a dollar amount on the exact improvement…and more importantly, is that dollar amount equal to the difference in price between DVD and Blu-Ray?

Perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this than some fans, because I’m a Doctor Who fan. We get our series one story at a time, eight stories a year, and there are twenty-six years of stories to go through. It took them almost literally the entire life of the format to release all the existing episodes of the classic series on VHS, and by the time they put out the last one (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, if memory serves me right) they’d already started putting out the DVDs. Which means I’m very familiar…perhaps uncomfortably familiar…with buying the same thing twice.

As a result, I can’t help but think that Blu-Ray is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–a way to get you to buy the same thing three times. Let’s face it; at a certain point, even the best movie stops making money for the studio, because the market’s saturated. Everyone already has it. The only solution is to find a new way to repackage it, so you’ll buy it twice. And improvements in technology are a remarkably convenient way to do that. And, to get back to the question at the beginning, the question in the title…at what point does the improvement become incremental enough, insignificant enough, that it’s not worth buying into the new format? Is Blu-Ray that point?

Oh, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is one of those columns where I don’t actually have an answer. (Except for myself, of course. I have one Blu-Ray disc, and I got it as a gift. The player was on sale for cheap. I won’t buy any DVD over ten bucks anymore…after all, I’ve got plenty to watch, and the prices always come down eventually. For me, market saturation’s a big saver!)

Reading MGK’s post about the recent resurrection of Kraven the Hunter reminds me of one of my core problems with superhero comics…not “comics these days”, not “Marvel Comics” or “DC Comics”, but one of those things that I always have to grit my teeth and ignore about the entire pulp-inspired genre of men and women with super-powers. And that’s the way that death and resurrection are treated so cavalierly. I’ve posted in the past on how it’s not just resurrection that’s the problem, but death itself: When death is common, resurrections have to be common or else you start running out of people to kill. This cheapens the sense of drama that death brings; how can you be worried that the main character might die if you know they’ll just be resurrected in five years?

But there have been some stories over the years where the death was intended to be permanent…and not just that, but the permanent death was used to craft a genuinely powerful and moving story about that character. Those stories deserve to be remembered, because it’s not their fault that someone decided later to bring the dead person back for a quick sales boost. So let’s talk about the truly great deaths, shall we?

5. Aunt May. I’m actually of the school that says Aunt May shouldn’t die, because despite the fact that her age and infirmity have almost become a running gag, she fulfills such a vital role in the Spider-Man storytelling engine that getting rid of her creates more problems than it solves. But if you have to kill her off, you’d have a hard time doing it better than in Amazing Spider-Man #400. This was exactly what her death needed to be–not at the hands of some super-villain or monster, but simply a gentle passage with her beloved nephew at her side. It was sweet, moving, and sad…even if her resurrection was probably necessary.

4. Supergirl/The Flash. I’m not really sure how much of this was actually the way they were written, and how much of it was just the sheer iconic majesty of their deaths as part of the universe-shattering Crisis on Infinite Earths. Of course, twenty-five years later, a generation of fan-turned-pro writers with meter-length hard-ons for the Silver Age has undone just about everything good about Crisis, and the deaths of Supergirl and the Flash are no exception. But at the time, Crisis genuinely felt epic because it wasn’t trying to be so self-consciously epic, and the deaths of Flash and Supergirl worked because they weren’t done just check off the “shocking death!” tick-boxes of that year’s crossovers.

3. Kraven the Hunter. The man who inspired the list. I actually think Kraven probably had a few good stories left in him when he died; strictly speaking, his death wasn’t “necessary”. But he was starting to become progressively more pathetic as time passed, and this story restored the menace and majesty to one of Lee and Ditko’s loopier creations. And even if it hadn’t ended with his death, it would have ended him as a character; once he defeated Spider-Man, what was left for him to do in the Spider-Man books? His suicide was somehow the least shocking element of the story, and the story was a masterful work of craft by some of the finest talents in comics.

2. Jean Grey. I’d argue that this one was a bit of a mistake, because Jean is such an iconic character in the X-books. But Claremont and Byrne didn’t plan to kill her to begin with, so I’ll give them a pass on that one…and they managed to turn the “problem” of killing Jean into one of the most dramatic scenes of sacrifice in Marvel history. The fact that it created years of hassles for later writers, who had to find a replacement for Jean, replace the replacement with Jean, and then merge Jean with her own replacement and then get rid of the replacement completely. (And then Grant Morrison made the indefensible mistake of killing Jean all over again, in a much less dramatic fashion for a much smaller pay-off. I loved Morrison’s run on X-Men, but he was edited way too lightly. Mark Powers should have recognized that Jean must have had some kind of value, or they wouldn’t have spent so much time and effort bringing her back in the first place. Throwing something away and finding out you need it later is an accident. Throwing something away, rooting through the trash to get it back, then throwing it away again later is just stupidity.)

1. Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin. A triumph. A sheer, unmitigated triumph. The first half of the story has a wonderful atmosphere of gathering gloom, as what seems to be a standard rescue-the-hero’s-girlfriend story feels inexplicably ominous and ends not with a triumphant hero, but with Spider-Man cradling his girlfriend’s body and swearing murderous revenge on the villain. And unlike the other sixteen billion times that happens in a comics story, you felt a) like he really meant it and was going to do it, and b) genuinely unsettled. Spider-Man doesn’t kill. We all knew that. But we knew the Green Goblin really needed to die. The subsequent story elegantly resolved that with a death that felt like the universe was punishing the Goblin, like his death was karmic retribution for his act of callous murder. The surprisingly adult ending to the story, with Peter realizing that vengeance was hollow and MJ discovering a new maturity by comforting him in his grief, was the icing on the cake. This was a genuinely stunning, brilliant story, and it says a lot that not even self-avowed “Gwen was Peter’s One True Love” fanboy and editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has been able to bring Gwen back. (As for the Green Goblin…don’t even get me started. Bob Harras was a Philistine.)

As always, feel free to add your opinions in the comments!

On the one hand, I’m not crazy enough to say that the “Star Wars” prequels are good. There’s some rough sailing there, for a variety of reasons: Lucas hadn’t directed a film in a long time, his scripts were less polished due to a lack of a strong editor…and the less said about Jar-Jar, the better. But there’s a very strong theme that tends to get lost or misinterpreted, and it’s actually pretty impressively clever–but it requires letting go of one of the big assumptions the classic trilogy gave us. You have to be willing to understand that while the Sith are the villains of the series, the Jedi are the other villains of the series.

Lots of people complained when the prequels came out that Lucas’ vision of the Jedi philosophy was sterile, emotionless, inconsistent and creepy. But this is not a bug; it’s a feature. Lucas didn’t accidentally make a Jedi code that made his heroes seem unpleasant, he deliberately made the Jedi just as absolutist and unsympathetic as the Sith, only from the other direction. The Jedi’s commitment to detachment and an impersonal “greater good” is as dangerous in its own way as the Sith’s unrestrained and unbridled passion.

Look at “The Phantom Menace”. Everyone jokes about Yoda’s decision that a nine-year-old Anakin is “too old” to begin the Jedi training. First Luke was too old, now Anakin…how young do you have to be to train as a Jedi, anyway? But the throw-away line has a terrifying implication. Anakin’s too old because he’s already had time to live life as a non-Jedi, to form attachments to other human beings. His love of his mother is seen by Yoda as a major strike against him, because if you love someone, you might be afraid to lose them, and fear is a Bad Thing under the Jedi code. One can imagine a maternity ward where the Jedi test newborns for their strength in the Force, taking away the potentially powerful forever to be raised in the Jedi temple (and possibly wiping the minds of the parents with their Jedi powers. After all, they’re “compassionate”, aren’t they?)

In Yoda’s world, love is bad. Hate is bad. Fear is bad. Anger is bad. The only emotions allowed are a sort of vague compassion and commitment to the “greater good”. The Jedi are basically raising an army of ruthless sociopaths, and calling it a positive thing–because supposedly, the only alternative is to be a violent psychopath. Even getting a little bit angry, even if it’s righteous anger against the Sith on behalf of someone you love, is the first step on the road to becoming pure evil. This is the equivalent of claiming that outrage over the Holocaust will make you a Nazi.

Anakin is torn apart–emotionally, ethically, and finally physically–by this false dichotomy. Yoda, his mentor, guru, teacher and spiritual leader, tells him that caring about the people he loves is evil and the only way to stop himself from falling to the Dark Side is to give up on Padme. On the other side, Palpatine tells him that the only way to save his wife is to give in completely to the Dark Side and become a child-slaughtering Sith Lord. There is no in-between, no give from either side, and Anakin is betrayed just as surely by the Jedi as by the Sith. Both sides insist he has to make a choice, when the correct choice is “none of the above.” When Obi-Wan says, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes,” everyone pointed to the irony, but not many people spotted that it was intentional.

That’s what the prophecy of “bringing balance to the Force” is about, even if Lucas never bothers explicating it properly. (Hey, I did say it was a half-hearted defense. For that matter, he never explains very well who the Sith are and what they’re getting revenge for…) In the end, Luke is being shaped by the Jedi as a weapon against the Sith, not trained as a heroic warrior. Yoda and Ben don’t tell Luke that he’s about to go kill his own father because they think it might make it harder for him to do what has to be done for the greater good, and because he’s “too old” to properly learn that it shouldn’t really matter if he’s gutting his dad like a fish. When he finds out, they view it more as an inconvenience than anything else. If that doesn’t strike you as insanely fucking creepy, why not?

When Luke announces that he thinks Vader can be redeemed, Yoda’s basic reaction is, “Well, we’re fucked.” In twenty-plus years, he never once thought of trying to reach out to Anakin with even the tiniest shred of human kindness, both because it’s antithetical to the Jedi philosophy to care about your friends (and oh, the symbolism of “you have to let your friends die in Vader’s trap” in light of the prequels) and because he just never saw the point, really. There’s no redemption in Yoda’s Manichean philosophy, so why bother trying?

Luke’s final battle against Vader and the Emperor is the culmination of all six movies. When we only saw it in the light of the classic trilogy, it seemed as though Luke was on the verge of falling to the Dark Side and only barely managed to redeem himself by remembering Yoda’s teachings; seen as part of the complete picture, it’s a total repudiation of Yoda’s philosophy. Luke gets angry at his enemy, uses his attachments to his friends as a source of determination, and uses the Force for attack–everything Yoda says will drive him permanently and irrevocably to the Dark Side. (And “once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny.” There are no in-betweens, remember?)

The Emperor, who’s bought into this black-and-white bullshit just as much as Yoda, says, “Now, strike him down and take his place at my side.” And Luke…doesn’t. He’s a Jedi. More importantly, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” The line is striking, in light of the full picture we see. Luke isn’t just saying that he’s not a Sith, he’s saying his father wasn’t either. Before Anakin Skywalker failed the Jedi, the Jedi failed Anakin Skywalker. It couldn’t be any clearer if he’d said, “Oh, and fuck you, you dried-up green bastard.”

Seen like that, the prequels actually have a lot of meat on them for Star Wars fans. They’re still not perfect, or even necessarily all that good, but they can be seen as “interesting failures”, perhaps even “flawed successes,” instead of the incoherent examples of excess that they seemed to be on first viewing.

Of course, there’s still no excuse for Jar Jar.

Last week, in my post on character death, I mentioned that the one character who absolutely nobody will miss is the Sentry, Marvel’s attempt to see just how narrowly the courts interpret the laws against copyright infringement (and just how badly they can piss off Alan Moore. I sometimes suspect that the Big Two have some sort of secret engine hidden in their basement, fueled entirely by Alan Moore’s irritation with them, and they need to periodically stoke it by leaving copyright notice off of his work or making a shitty movie version of one of his comics.) But I didn’t get to the root of the problem. Why, apart from being a gigantic fucking Mary Sue and a blatant rip-off of Miracleman and apocalyptically uninteresting, is the Sentry such a goddamn terrible character that death wasn’t good enough for him?

Unfortunately for my attempts to be original and clever, Ragnell posted a very nice analysis on her blog that notes a lot of the key points. I’ll try not to repeat too much of what she said, because that’s what links are for, but basically she points out how the Sentry is portrayed as retroactively being the most awesome person in the whole Marvel Universe, the guy who was everyone’s best friend and mentor and helped Angel learn how to embrace his mutant gift and showed Reed Richards how to care and taught Rogue how to love and shot Uncle Ben…no, wait. Not that last one.

But she doesn’t get deep enough into the problem. She points to those things as being terrible in and of themselves, because they reduce the entire Marvel Universe to the role of supporting characters in the Sentry’s story, and she’s right, but the deeper problem is that those things didn’t happen. The Sentry is not a long-established, integral part of the Marvel Universe. He’s not the one guy who’s always been able to calm the Hulk down when he’s pissed, he’s not the one guy who Doctor Doom has always been afraid of, he’s not the one guy who Reed Richards can talk to and the one guy that Rogue can turn to for a booty call. He’s some total schmuck we don’t care about. We are not emotionally invested in the Sentry, because that’s something you have to earn over time. It cannot be imposed by editorial fiat.

Not that they haven’t tried. There’s almost an element of condescension to the constant retcons that shove the Sentry into an ever-higher profile within the fictional history of the Marvel Universe. “Oh, the Sentry is totally a major part of the Marvel Universe and always has been! You just don’t remember him. Stupid, stupid readers. Why don’t you remember how awesome the Sentry was?” But it doesn’t work because we’ve got the back issues. We’ve read the stories. They were an integral part of our childhood, and our transition to adulthood. And the Sentry wasn’t there. Having him show back up now is like having your absentee dad pop back up when you’re thirty and try to take you to a ballgame.

(Actually, it’s a bit like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Having an old friend of Indy’s betray him at a crucial moment, shattering their long-time friendship and setting them against each other? Good idea. Having the friend be someone we’ve never met and have no emotional investment in? Not so much. It’s hard to care about Mac’s betrayal, because he’s a total stranger to the viewer. The whole thing feels hollow.)

No matter how much history they make up for the Sentry in the Marvel Universe’s timeline, it’s history with the reader that counts. All the retcons have a faint stench of desperation to them, a feeling that they can compensate for lack of depth with an increase in volume. There’s no history between the Hulk and the Sentry? Howabout we just have everyone talk about how they’re the bestest friends ever! The Sentry’s never really achieved any kind of heroic triumphs? Howabout we have everyone remind each other about how he saved the world over and over and over again! The more they talk about how great he is, the more it reminds us that we haven’t seen any actual evidence of that supposed greatness, and the more hollow and useless he seems. Until at the end, we get a funeral scene filled with characters telling us how much he changed their lives forever with his brilliance and awesomeness…only to never ever ever mention him again the second the dirt is heaped on his grave.

Oh, dear. They’re at it again, aren’t they?

Sorry, that probably requires a bit of explanation. Um, and I’m going to deliver that explanation in a nice, long paragraph, so that those of you who don’t want spoilers for the new Doctor Who episode, “Flesh and Stone”, which has aired in Britain but not in America, can skip this entry if you like.

Basically, for those of you not familiar with the series (or at least, not over-familiar with the series) the Doctor, an enigmatic wanderer in time and space, tends to have a traveling companion with him on his journeys. (Primarily as a way of solving a lot of writing problems–the Doctor tends to already know a lot of things the audience needs to know, so having an inexperienced traveling companion is an easy way of delivering expository dialogue that doesn’t sound forced.) These companions tend, very frequently, to be pretty young women. (Again, this is done for rather mundane reasons; the series wants to appeal to a very broad audience, and there are certain elements of the viewing public that respond strongly to pretty young women…for one reason or another.) Thus, it’s become something of a running gag among viewers that we never actually do see what the Doctor does in the TARDIS with those pretty young women between adventures.

And in the relaunched series (we are now trending towards the spoilery bits, here) that element has become more explicit. Rose, the Doctor’s companion, has a very obvious crush on the Doctor, and while the Doctor can’t ever bring himself to actually say the words, “I love you,” at any point, David Tennant is clearly playing the part as a man in love. Martha, the next companion, has her own crush on the Doctor, but since he’s still mooning over the departed Rose, she’s got no chance (an element that’s rather overplayed in Season Three, but that’s another story.) The romance angle goes into full retreat for Season Four and the 2009 specials (excepting for the season finale to Season Four, where Rose comes back and we practically get swooping strings when the two of them see each other)…but now it’s rearing its head again. Current companion Amy Pond just about jumps the Doctor’s bones at the end of “Flesh and Stone”. But the Doctor doesn’t reciprocate…despite Karen Gillan being just about the prettiest of the pretty young women ever to join the Doctor in his travels. Why?

The question is actually pretty contentious, in Doctor Who circles. (It says something about Doctor Who that it is actually less contentious than the question of what year the Third Doctor stories took place in.) There are a lot of people who believe that sex is off-limits in Doctor Who, at least in regards to the Doctor himself. They feel the Doctor should be above that sort of thing, even if they can’t necessarily articulate why. (Or if they can’t agree on a reason why. Doctor Who has possibly the strongest gay fan following of any science-fiction series, precisely because he’s a male sci-fi hero who doesn’t lust after women. To a lot of fans, the reason he doesn’t hit on his female companions is the same reason Will doesn’t hit on Grace.)

There are a lot of people who make the counter-argument that the Doctor most certainly does have a sexual relationship with many, if not most of his companions over the years. They insist that the people who insist “sex shouldn’t be allowed in Doctor Who” are prudes at best, Puritans at worst, who never noticed the sexual subtext of the older stories and now get angry when they spot it in the newer ones. (A sub-set of these people feel that there’s a sexual subtext to some, but not all stories, and that the Doctor has a “true love”, who is {INSERT COMPANION HERE} and that this is the perfect pairing and the series hasn’t been any good since that true love left and he’s been forced to make do with pale substitutes. All of these people are twelve-year-old girls. Even the ones who aren’t.)

Me? I fall at least a little into the former camp. I feel that there’s a reason why Russell T Davies and Stephen Moffat, the people who’ve been in charge of the relaunched series, haven’t pushed the boundaries of the Doctor’s sexuality too far. (And they really, really haven’t. For all that the Tenth Doctor is much more lovey-dovey than his predecessor, he still won’t even say the words, “I love you.” Not even once. My standing joke is that all the times he says, “Rose…I need to tell you…” and trails off, he’s trying to find a way to explain that traveling in the TARDIS makes you sterile.) It really isn’t in the Doctor’s character to have a sexual relationship with his companions, and Amy Pond provides the key to why. (Well, half the key.)

When Amy makes her rather blatant come-on to the Doctor, his response (played magnificently by Matt Smith) is absolute horror. He can’t imagine sleeping with Amelia Pond, because Amelia Pond is the seven-year-old girl he was just talking to a few days ago. Sure, she had a rather inconvenient case of growing up, but as the Doctor said to her, “Don’t worry; we’ll soon sort that out.” He’s not looking for a lover. He’s looking for a daughter. Or, if we’re to provide the other half of the key to the Doctor’s character, a grand-daughter.

Because the first pretty young woman the Doctor traveled with, back when he was an old man played by William Hartnell, was his grand-daughter Susan. (Also more contentious than sex: Whether William Hartnell was the actual first incarnation of the Doctor, or just the first we’ve seen.) The two were inseparable, each one the only reminder the other had of their home, and the original stories tended to focus on the differences between them and the humans that shared the TARDIS with the Doctor. (When Carole Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan, left the series, some speculated it wouldn’t survive her departure.) Susan’s departure was a watershed moment, a coming of age as the Doctor finally realized that staying with him was preventing her from living her own life. He forced her to stay behind with the man she’d come to love in one of the most bittersweet moments of the show’s history.

And the subsequent episode makes explicit what all the subsequent stories would leave as subtext. Ian and Barbara, the Doctor’s human friends, convince him to adopt a young orphan woman they’ve rescued from a crashed starship as their new traveling companion. Vicki becomes a surrogate grand-daughter to the Doctor, someone who makes him feel young and alive as they share the wonders of exploring the universe together…until she also falls in love with a boy and leaves. And the Doctor found another surrogate for Susan, and another, and another…at heart, Doctor Who is a series about a lonely old man who’s lost his family, and who finds it again with an orphaned girl. (This is the one really big mistake the new series makes with Rose, I think; not that she loves the Doctor, but that she only travels with the Doctor by choice. All the best companions of the old series were running away from something.)

Not every companion is living in Susan’s shadow, of course; Romana, for instance, seems to be pretty blatantly shagging the Doctor off-screen. (Mainly because Lalla Ward and Tom Baker pretty much were blatantly shagging each other off-screen. But now is not the time to delve into the vast store of gossip about who was having sex with who on the set.) But that’s the model of Doctor Who. That’s the reason why all the jokes about “What is the Doctor doing with those pretty young girls between adventures?” miss the point. The Doctor has a father’s love for his companions, not a romantic passion. There is most definitely a difference.

All right, I hope this is not an abuse of my posting priviledges here, but I thought there might be a chance that someone here could help me. There’s bit in the Tank Girl movie with Lori Petty where Malcolm McDowell says,

“Eight, eight, the burning eight. Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day so dark it will devastate.”

Okay, what the hell is that from? (Might also be “The burning hate”?) Surely that’s not original to the movie; there’s got to be a source, hasn’t there? But Google turns up nothing but quotes from Tank Girl itself. McDowell later quotes some variation on “Abandone all hope, ye who enter here” from Dante, but the “burning eight” bit does’t turn up in a cursory glance of the English translation of The Inferno I have.

If anybody out there could tell me the source, or if it really is an invention of the screenwriter, I would appreciate the hell out if it, because it’s been driving me crazy since Friday.

Oh, and um … so that I’m actually providing some measure of content and not just a plea for assistance … Okay, I know that Tank Girl gets a bad rap, particularly among comics fans who see it as a travesty to the source material. And I guess it sort of is a travesty to the source material. But divorced from all that, it’s still a pretty iconoclastic movie. In the pantheon of Early To Mid Nineties Sci-Fi Dystopia Movies Made On A Modest Budget, it’s  a very fun and unusual experience (and I will watch Malcolm McDowell in pretty much anything, frankly). This is a movie in which Lori Petty gets a weird haircut and takes a bath in sand, Iggy Pop cameos as a pedophile, a bizarre animated interlude takes the place of a proper ending, two songs by Bjork are played, and Ice-T receives second billing as a mutated kangaroo-man designed by Stan Winston’s company. It’s a testament to that insanity of the Hewlett and Martin comics that a movie like this comes off a totally watered-down, cleaned-up Hollywood adaptation. It could have been a little better, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At least it was directed by someone who wanted to get some of the visual feel and anarchic flavor of the comics, and who hard the absolute nerve to make a sci-fi movie with a female lead who wasn’t “conventionally” hot.

Weird thing, though, the box to the DVD has a banner across the top that says “AVANT-GARDE CINEMA,” and that’s probably stretching it. Avant-garde a clue, maybe. (Joke copyright 1968 George Harrison.)