After far, far too long a time, I finally popped the movie Dark Star (1974) off the reader-requested review queue at 366 Weird Movies. Not only is it a long-standing cult favorite for being the first theatrical release for both John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon when they were still film students, it’s also a quirky and unique sci-fi comedy whose “hippies in space” motif is just enough to flirt with the list of weirdest movies of all time.
IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art
So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.
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My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral
I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.
I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.
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IMGUR dump: Vintage Science Fiction from the Golden Age
My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.
UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:
- The Most Underrated Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Movies – Looking for sci-fi movies that actually peg the apocalypse? Here’s a list of the more realistic takes on the end of civilization as we know it.
- Things CoronaVirus Has Taught Me About Apocalyptic / Dystopian Sci-Fi – COVID-19 pointed out the plot holes in our concept of what an apocalypse would look like.
- Groundhog Day and Time Travel in Sci-Fi – On Groundhog Day, we marked the best time travel movies which treat the premise with the playful fun it deserves.
- Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film – While Hollywood is scrounging the bottom of the bargain comic books bin looking for yet another superhero movie, these epic science fiction languish in the darkness without a film adaptation.
- Why Do We Force-Feed Dystopian Literature To Students? – You’re not living in a dystopia; I checked for you.
- Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions – Show your faith in the new breed of gods for the thinking age, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Dr. J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.
New at 123ish: The day social media did something right for once
Look, down in the dump! It’s #trashtag, the social media challenge that made people realize they could use tag games for good! No longer do they have to choke down spoonfuls of cinnamon or run around blindfolded staggering into traffic. They can help clean up public places and score Internet up-arrows at the same time.
It’s small, but it’s progress. baby steps, baby steps.
Random links related to things I’ve said about social media before:
- My social media memes on Daily Funny (boy is that one dead!)
- Social Media Optimization – The Other Digital Marketing! – Did you know there’s more to digital marketing than just SEO?
- Reasons Why I’m Not Popular On Social Media
- The backlash against what Bill Maher said about comic book fans – Yeah sorry, I’m on Bill’s side this time.
- The Nazi-Incel rage over – wait for it – a razor commercial – Commemorating one of the stupidest and noisiest social media storms in recent history.
New At 366: Run Away To Frankenstein Island!
Cor blimey, it feels good to finally get Frankenstein Island off my to-review list! 366Weird indulged my Apocrypha recommendation, read this hysterical mess and marvel at the bad B-movie even MST3K never touched!
Oh, and if you tried to visit this site in the past ~48 hours and found it gronked, that’s because a hosted server update clobbered my custom .htaccess Apache voodoo, and I had to grovel to tech support to reset everything and then re-install new, improved voodoo. I can now commence transmitting my madness to the unsuspecting Interwebs.
But wait, there’s more! You’re here because you’re curious about legendary schlock-director Jerry Warren’s magnum opus, so here’s some bonus material outside the normal scope of a 366Weird write-up:
Continue reading “New At 366: Run Away To Frankenstein Island!”
New at 123ish.com: Is Disney A Monopoly, And Should We Be Worried?
Disney has recently raised some harrumphs in the geek community for becoming the owner of both Lucasfilm and Marvel properties. Is that enough to make Disney The Mouse That Roared? I discuss that question in the context of the big picture: In 2019, what media company isn’t a gigantic, world-crushing monopoly? As I demonstrate, hardly any.
As an addendum, literally the day after I posted this, rumor has it that Disney may shut down Marvel Comics right after acquiring it. If so, my prediction there:
“And here Disney just acquired two properties which – hold your fire, please – may prove to not be so valuable in a few years’ time.”
…proved more prophetic than I intended. Oops.
Other Disney-related things I’ve had to say over the years:
- The Cult of Don Bluth – Former Disney animator, he struck out a career on his own and briefly beat the Mouse that Roared at his own game. Now fighting to get the classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair realized on screen.
- Forgotten Gems Of Disney’s Dork Age – Disney put Generation X through hell in the 1970s, but these were its least stinky turkeys during that creative holocaust.
- Best Disney Villain Figures – Paying tribute to the best of the baddest in Disney, with handsome collectible figurines.
Seriously, I don’t say much about Disney because it overall sucks.
New at 366Weird: Eating Raoul (1982)
At long last, I got the opportunity to vindicate this gonzo cannibal comedy for the brilliant social satire it was: Light-years ahead of its time. I offer Eating Raoul (1982) as a candidate for the Weird Movies’ List apocrypha.
Paul Bartel was writer, director, and co-lead, which makes this probably his magnum opus in his too-short career. But for what few opportunities he did find, Paul Bartel was a master of deadpan black comedy, albeit a little too reserved for the tastes of modern audiences.
New at 123ish: If You Mourned NASA’a Opportunity Like A Lost Pet, This One’s For You
Why do humans anthropomorphize inanimate objects? Here we are on the brink of advances in AI, and we’re still failing the reverse Turing test with a simple shell script from the 1960s. Let’s explore the curious twists and turns of how humans relate to technology and get to know the Eliza effect. And maybe you won’t be impressed with Eliza, but you won’t be forgetting Laurie B. Andrews any time soon…
Related: My previous nattering on how much power AI is getting over us even now.
More stuff about robots and AI:
- Our Continuously Evolving Relationship With AI
- The 100th Anniversary of the Robot Apocalypse
- I Sing the Body Electric – Songs About Computers
Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch
I don’t mean to gripe, but Millennials sure demand a lot of attention. There’s twenty stories about them per day; they’re killing this thing, they’re embracing that thing, they have it tough because this, they react because that.
Meanwhile, Generation X is over here passed over both ways. We got a couple minutes in the spotlight in the 1990s and that was the end of us. Which suits most of us, but when I keep hearing about how rotten the Millennials have it, that’s the part I get sick of hearing about. Money did not rain from the sky before Millennials were born. Somehow I jumped directly from the have-nots line to the “privileged elite” line while still being the same broke-ass slacker I was in 1990.
As an example of Generation X gripes we never got the chance to air, I present “Kitschy Nightmares From Satan’s Thrift Store” and “Vintage Magazine Ads,” both wry observations of pop culture in the mid-20th century. This, kids, is what your poor papa and mama had to live through. Which is why we’re so funny.
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