L. Sprague de Camp's Viagens Interplanetarias, the Krishna Stories

"Tarzan" was nothing short of an extraordinary creation. No wonder he was so popular: he went down a feral path that made him different from the rest of the human race. A lot of effort was spent by Burroughs getting us into Tarzan's inner life, his attitudes and prejudices to mankind, animals, religion. When I was a kid, I ate and drank Tarzan; his stories were pure romance and adventure, with hordes of Arabs, spy saboteurs, Tarzan hunting beside beasts, and images like Tarzan smoking cigarettes and drinking absinthe while going to art galleries in Paris, just before tossing aside his fancy duds to swing on a streetlamp to escape police.

John Carter of Mars, on the other hand, was a dud; a boring 11th-level Fighter with a nonexistent personality besides alpha male valor, an irritating Gary Stu. It's no wonder Tarzan went on to fame and fortune as a pop culture icon, whereas the duller J.C. is far less famous.



It wasn't just that John Carter was a total bore, but that his world of Barsoom was downright insane. Guns were available, but everyone fights gallant duels with cutlasses and sabers. There were a few occasions where it was just a little too "Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half Century" to possibly be taken seriously: for instance, the idea that to avoid intrusion, at night houses on Mars have giant columns that raise their homes up hundreds of feet into the air (!) and how the mass transit system of Martian cities were based on shooting people out of giant guns (!). There was even one scene where, God help me, I couldn't stop laughing at the mental image: in Warlord of Mars there's a tower that turns into a giant magnet, which despite the best efforts of Burroughs's baroque prose sounds like nothing quite so much as a gigantic free-standing dildo. The giant tower magnet, when turned on sweeps a whole fleet from the air, all the battleships stuck to the surface like fridge magnets!

As a Heinlein-loving kid (Heinlein being a guy that, like all good science fiction writers, realized suspension of disbelief had to be earned and so he concerned himself with science and plausibility), I always had a feeling there was something screwy about John Carter's world and physics. For instance, his improbable hundred-foot leaps into the air "under Martian gravity." This is the kind of misunderstanding that happens when you barely hear an idea, like how when you were a kid, you heard that you would only weigh 1/5th your current weight on the Moon, and you actually thought you would lose weight! Not to mention the absence of armor from Martial society; even Stone Age people use coconut husks and tortoise shells for shields! And finally, most implausibly of all, John Carter had a baby (an egg!) with his Martian wife. Ask any genetic scientist and they'll tell you it's easier to cross a human with a geranium than an extraterrestrial.


So, along comes one of the most talented writers of science fiction's Golden Age, L. Sprague de Camp, with the determination to do a "Sword & Planet" story, but to "get it right," without technological or biological absurdities, a world that is every bit as exciting as Barsoom but which actually makes sense. And lo, the Krishna stories were created! While reading the Hostage of Zir, I have to say I was delighted for nearly every moment.



Krishna is a planet with technology in the Middle Ages range, whose primary inhabitants are antennaed green-skinned humanoids. Because of the dangers of exposing a warlike, primitive planet high technology, explorers and other human visitors are limited to the local weaponry, bows and armor and sailing ships. It's interesting to note that FTL travel is impossible in the universe of Krishna; it takes eleven years (in "real time, " though not relativistically) to jaunt to the planet and back, although because of the increase in the human lifespan that isn't a catastrophic absence. I always thought this was a great touch of realism; in many ways the freewheeling ability to zip through the cosmos in a lot of space opera really makes you forget how huge and overwhelming space actually is.



My all-time favorite of the Krishna stories is the Hand of Zei. In it, Dirk Barnavelt, a ghost writer ruled over tyrannically by his aged mother, is sent by the publishing company to find the actual explorer their works are based on, who disappeared on the low-tech world of Krishna while searching for a group of pirates that smuggle janru, a narcotic that makes men subservient to women.

What's especially interesting is that the planet Krishna has actually changed as a result of contact with human beings. At dive bars on Krishna, the singer was heard performing earth songs like "Jingle Bells" and the latest pop hits. Worse, one of the more popular games on Krishna is Chinese Checkers, although the natives call it "Chanichekr" or "Chanichekash."

To reach the legendary Sunqar, a floating island made entirely of giant mats of seaweed like the Sargasso, Dirk Barnavelt traveled in disguise as a legendary to Qirib, a country ruled by amazon warriors, with a horrible old virago of a queen that reminds Dirk of his domineering mother. In one memorable scene, he rides the mass-transit rail system linking cities and countries, which instead of locomotives, on the low-tech world are instead pulled by gigantic bishtars, two-trunked alien elephants.


The Princess Zei of Qirib is captured by the pirates, which means Dirk has to rescue her whether he likes it or not. I love the Princess Zei. She has a big nose, talks with her mouth full, and gets off on men telling her what to do, and yet somehow she is far more fascinating and loveable than the flawless and boring Dejah Thoris.

Dirk Barnavelt leads a ship into the Sunqar, a pirate realm nearly the size of a kingdom who live on a floating island of giant ship choking seaweed mats. Someone call Doc Savage, that's the plot of the Sargasso Ogre! What's interesting is that as an American raised with ideas of equality, he has real moral problems with being the kind of brutal, authoritarian disciplinarian sort of sea captain that is required in that kind of society in order to maintain order. In addition to possible mutiny, he has to face a gvam, a hideous sea monster that is a cross between a swordfish and an octopus.

When he arrives at the Sunqar, Barnavelt finds the leader of the pirates is an alien from the planet Osiris, a giant velociraptor like creature with mental hypnotic powers, who far from being a sinister mentalist, is portrayed as a nervous, high strung hypochondriac. Dirk is able to rescue the Princess, only to find his ship beached in an escape attempt against a haunted island. The origin of the haunted stories are revealed to be brutish tailed men, who are related to Krishnans the same way Neanderthals are related to Homo sapiens.

(This is another thing I like about the Krishna books: L. Sprague de Camp's broad knowledge of everything, including paleontology. Krishna, unlike other Sword & Planet worlds, had a definite prehistory. Indeed, Krishnans themselves have a taxonomic category: Krishanthropus Sapiens, and the tailed men are Krishanthropus koloftus. There is even a Linnean explanation for why some creatures on the planet have six limbs and others four, as both families left the sea at different times.)



What I find most interesting about the burgeoning relationship between Dirk Barnavelt and the Princess Zei is, the problems that keep them from being together are real problems. One of the more irritating thing about Burroughs females, especially that useless pain in the ass Jane, is their tendency to do things that are illogical and wildly out of character for no other reason than to create the requisite conflict for the story. By contrast, in Zei's amazonian country, the husband of the queen rules for a year and then is ritually cooked and eaten. This could have just been another little side-gag to emphasize this planet's barbaric exoticism, along with the Krishnan love of attending public executions, but it is actually a major obstacle to their relationship. In fact, when the two are stuck in the Sunqar without food and are starting to starve, Dirk looks at his Princess and starts to shudder. When the two are necking, Dirk laughs and asks her if she's trying to get a little taste of him first.



In the end, Dirk returns with Zei a hero and leads a gigantic fleet against the Sunqar pirates, all of which will wear skis so they can run over the terpahla seaweed. Krishnan warfare is a beautiful thing: reconnaissance is done with hang-gliders given temporary boosts by explosive chemicals, who land on a flat-topped ship rather like a modern-day aircraft carrier with a rubber band like device for launching the gliders.

Dirk leads the army of amazons and gliders to victory, causing the pirates to honorably surrender. But when the virago Queen Alvandi, the mother of Zei who only wanted to go after the pirates as they cut into her percentage decides to maroon them, Dirk switches sides and teams up with the pirates. He thereafter discovers that his lovely Princess Zei is - surprise! Also an earthling in disguise, captured by the Queen Alvandi from slavers in disguise. The Princess knew Dirk was an earthman all along too. How? He had a belly button! As the people of Krishna lay eggs, nobody on Krishna has a navel.


Dirk Barnavelt in the end leads the pirates against the Qirib monarchy and restores equal rights for men. By standing up to Queen Alvandi, it's like he's stood up to his own mother too and declared his personal emancipation. Shortly thereafter he takes Zei, and forms a company in the Sunqar dedicated to soap production.

There's even a little sarcastic aside where Dirk Barnavelt's buddy, Tangaloa, a grossly overweight, tail-chasing Polynesian Anthropologist, warns him about the dangers of his Warlord of Mars dreams, which might as well be a chastising tut-tut to fans of all Sword & Planet stories:
"Ahem, Dirk, you know these earthly adventurers who run around backward planets exploiting the natives tend to be inferior types that can't compete with their own kind back home. They take advantage of earth's more sophisticated culture, which they themselves do nothing to create... " "Oh, foof! I've heard that lecture too. Call me an inferior if you like, but here I'm quite a guy. npt a shy schizoid Oedipean afraid of his Ma."

My summary above doesn't quite get across the marvelous sense of humor the stories have. I wouldn't be comfortable calling them parodies, the way some other analysts have, because they are first and foremost very boyish, fun adventure stories. But they do reverse expectations in a very amusing and wonderful way, and set about breaking the formula of the Burroughs narrative. The alien leader of the pirates that rules over them with mind control powers is a nervous, easily excitable velociraptor hypochondriac.

One of my favorite parts was when, as Barnavelt returns from the land of the tailed beast-men, his anthropologist friend chastises him for the destruction he wrought on a society anthropologists would like to study. Barnavelt rightly points out they were cannibals about to eat him. Tangaloa says that many Polynesian tribes in the South Pacific only became "savage to outsiders" because they were preyed on by slavers. This is an interesting observation since many tailed Krishnans were in fact, seen in the book series as slaves!

That's what I like about L. Sprague de Camp. Any other writer would have just stuck in some savage cannibals because that's what the story needs. He thought through exactly why these guys are such jerks, what would lead them to be this way historically. That's why Krishna fascinates me: this is obviously written by someone that is a world traveller, that has undergone the experience of going to a bar in Asia and then hearing the latest Top 40 song on the intercom, who knows what they're talking about when it comes to weapons and antique sailing ships.

The chapter where Dirk Barnavelt reconfigures his sails is so full of antique sailing terms that it is nearly incomprehensible jargon. Still, you can't help but be impressed, just as you would be with Tom Clancy's rapid-fire use of military acronyms and terms, because it shows this guy knows what he's talking about and has clearly thought it through.

I can't mention the Hand of Zei without mentioning how the interior illustrations are done by master pulp illustrator Edd Cartier, who also did most of the art for the original Street & Smith Shadow magazine. I tried looking for some Edd Cartier Krishna art, but none of it was online, so I scanned some from my copy and put them up here.

Man, mentioning Edd Cartier's name has got to at least double my google hits. So, here goes: Edd Cartier. Edd Cartier. EDD CARTIER.

The other Krishna stories are hilarious, full of eccentric, weird kings with unusual hobbies like clockwork toys. One of the best was the king of Kalwm in The Prisoner of Zhamanak.

In it, a big black Nigerian named Percy Mijpa hears of an earth girl xenologist held prisoner by a Krishnan. Despite being a black African, he looks down on Krishnans like a Victorian Englishman does on "the natives," and vows to rescue Alicia Dykman.


In one of the best scenes of the book, Percy and Alicia are captured by the ruler of Kalwm like zoo animals, wondering if the Caucasian and African races on earth can interbreed together. He even has their clothes removed as they're placed in the cage. This is made all the funnier by Percy's natural uptightness and attitude of devout monogamy to his fat, jolly little wife that he left back at the spaceport. Obviously the sheer awkwardness of this scene makes it to nearly every single cover of every single edition I've seen.

All in all, the Krishna works are science fiction classics and worth reading. In the words of Reading Rainbow's Levar Burton: "You don't have to take my word for it...but I'd be pretty pissed if you didn't."

Julian's SECRET Kenyan Birth Certificate Found!

Revealing Julian as the evil Muslim plant we all know he is, the birth certificate gives his full name as "Julian Hussein Jihad Whiteykill Mr. T Perez."

Why, it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate!

The Fifteen Best Comics Characters of All-Time (Part 1, 15-11)

15. Hans von Hammer "The Hammer of Hell"

"The sky is the killer of us all."

A haunted, troubled yet duty-bound man surrounded by war and murder, much of it his own making, Hans von Hammer was a World War I flying ace based on the Red Baron called to kill and kill again, after which new nighmares of death joined the previous ones during his sleeping hours. He once befriended a wolf in the Black Forest, because the both of them are both killers, and that wolf was his only real friend.

In that sense, von Hammer was a tragic and somewhat pitiful person, an example of the very broken people that war creates on the one hand, an honorable man with a strong sense of duty on the other. Hans von Hammer had noble and chivalrous instincts: he saluted enemies even after he killed them, and refused to shoot and kill even an unarmed foe.

Enemy Ace's strip was extraordinary for many reasons, not the least of which was the tragic, morally conflicted character of von Hammer himself. It was an American strip featuring a German Ace. It was the first true strip of the Vietnam era: it showed the exhaustion and disgust with war, and none of them had happy endings. It was a dark, evocative strip with art by Gil Kane and featured antagonists like the hideously disfigured French Ace, the Hangman.

BEST COMICS: STAR-SPANGLED WAR STORIES #148 features the death of a dog, but that's not the only reason to like it. Von Hammer befriends a dog, Schatzi, who dies when he falls out of von Hammer's biplane. In revenge, von Hammer coldly and methodically massacres a platoon of British soldiers. Honor, senseless blood-killing that is shown to the reader not as fun but with disgust, and glimmers of humanity on the part of a lonely and tragic man. All in all, good reading. There was also a wonderful and sentimental Batman and Enemy Ace "meeting" set long after World War I done by Neil Adams in DETECTIVE COMICS #442.

14. Foolkiller

"All the days of their lives have led to this moment. They will be given their chance at salvation...to succeed or fail! It was ordained long ago in Heaven that this day they would meet...the Foolkiller!"

A religious fanatic with a demented sense of his own great purpose and mission, the Foolkiller was first introduced as seeking to kill the Man-Thing, who he correctly determined was formerly scientist Ted Sallis. "Only I cared enough to investigate his disappearance fully!" His great weapon is the Purification Ray, a nearly unstoppable blaster beam of white light only able to be wielded by the righteous. Naturally, only the Foolkiller himself is worthy of wielding it! The Foolkiller periodically returns to his tractor trailer to converse with his boss, Mike, a grisly corpse of a priest in formaldehyde that the Foolkiller himself murdered.

The Foolkiller murders at the drop of a hat for crimes like scoffing at his mission and denying God. He is a relentless pursuer that never forgets the slightest insult. The Foolkiller is nearly unstoppable and relentless: like the villains in slasher movies, he never stops, and as a fanatic he is truly threatening, ramming a truck through a diner to kill a disk jockey that insulted him.

BEST STORY: His sole appearance was in THE MAN THING #3-4, by Steve Gerber.

WORST STORY: None, as at least the original Foolkiller never appeared again.

13. Madame Hydra/Viper

"I said that we are not walking out of here into the jails of the police! The valiant outlaw called Cobra, the dedicated agent of the Serpent Crown...and the foolhardy agents of oppression...are going to end this story dramatically, as martyrs to the Serpent's Cause. That's all it is, you know, a story! A story to grow with time into a legend. A story not to be told as fact, but as inspiration! A story to breed more like me!"

Quite possibly the most terrifying, shockingly coldblooded female villain in the entire Marvel Universe, a study in the depths of human evil and fanatacism.

A fanatic nihilist, everything to Madame Hydra is meaninglessness instead of happenstance. She has no illusions about the importance of life, and holds her own with just as little value. She has the fanatic martyrdom of a suicide bomber, and like a suicide bomber, she realizes just how powerful martyrs become, as ideas that never die.

BEST STORY: Steve Englehart's CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON #181-182. The story opes with Viper murdering the original Viper and donning his costume. Then, as she reveals the death of the original to his brother, who she intends to team up with, the Eel breaks down at the loss of the only family he ever had. All the while, Madame Hydra loudly proclaims the original Viper a martyr to their cause.

It that wasn't enough, in the very next issue, King Cobra, a guy just in it for the money, is trapped in a burning building where Viper intends for both of them to make their last stand. Cobra starts to go mad as he realizes the horror of being trapped with this madman, and the Viper's soul-chilling response is printed in its entirety at the quote section at the top above.

WORST STORY: As he did with other female characters, Chris Claremont formed a fascination with Madame Hydra, and from her chilling beginnings wasted her as just another femme fatale.

12. Magneto

If the Hulk was based on the blueprint of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Magneto owes his inspiration to one of the most magnetic characters of the literature of the 19th century, Captain Nemo. Like Nemo, Magneto sufered a terrible loss that caused him to reject the idea of the goodness of the human race and turns his back on it in disgust. Motivated by a great inner nobility, Magneto looks angrily at how human vices usurp our capacity for good: how much more we spend on weapons than on feeding the hungry, for instance. At the same time, he's motivated by anger and grief that has poisoned his soul that makes his guilty of terrible crimes.

BEST STORY: UNCANNY X-MEN #150. The ultimate, definitive Magneto story. Magneto issues an ultimatum to the world: give total power to him, which he would use for enlightened purposes while they wasted their energy on greed, or face destruction. In the end, Magneto is confronted by the X-Men and he snaps, loses his temper, and kills a child (Kitty Pride, since you asked...no wonder I loved this comic!). Realizing the horror of what he did, and what he intended to do, Magneto surrenders and abandoned his scheme.

Also, read X-MEN #1-3. Everyone remembers it as a Jim Lee artpalooza that sold a trillion copies, but few people remember that it was actually a very well-made Magneto story, where Magneto was drawn from his self-imposed exile by "acolytes" that worship him.

WORST STORY: This one undoubtedly goes to that appalling dimwit Grant Morrison and his lengthy rampage on the X-Books, where he had Magneto smash half of New York and toss humans into ovens. It is every bit as unintentionally funny as it sounds. Another dishonorable mention (and boy, does it hurt to type this) would be Steve Englehart in an early Avengers issue, where he featured Magneto as a cackling Hanna-Barbara supervillain in the weakest story of his entire career, centered around that most riveting of mysteries, "Why is Magneto wearing the Angel's costume?"

And speaking of the Angel...

11. Candy Southern

Possibly one of the best-realized of all "hero girlfriends," Candy Southern was much, much more than just the "love interest" for a hero that pouted when he went on dangerous missions. There were occasions when we saw Candy Southern running Warren Industries, and she often joked that Southern International, her own company, would buy him out. She was someone that was able to actually lead a hero's team when her man was knocked out, a heroic story with a tragic ending. In one comic, Candy Southern actually accompanied the X-Men when her love, Warren Worthington was in danger!

Almost all hero's girlfriends are said to be independent and competent women, but Candy Southern actually was all those things the others were said to be, but never really were.

BEST STORY: In NEW DEFENDERS #138 Candy Southern had the chutzpah to (and I can't believe I'm typing this) take charge of the Defenders. In NEW DEFENDERS #145, when the others were considering leaving in the wake of the Angel's blindness and other events, Candy Southern convinced the Defenders to stay and not disband. And most incredibly of all, she remained in charge of the team for nearly the rest of the comic's run, proclaimed by the rest as Team Leader and Chief Executive Officer of the group, having final power over who was and wasn't in the group. She even built a new security system for the team's base and recruited new members, with total control over who came in and didn't.

Others might be upset by the inclusion of Candy Southern and would prefer another supporting cast member, like J. Jonah Jameson or Lois Lane. To them, I ask this: could you possibly imagine Lois Lane doing something similar for the Justice League? Did any other hero's love interest ever do anything that significant?

Another example of a good Candy Southern story would be her first posthumous appearance in UNCANNY X-MEN #306. She was merged with the same techno-organic being as Cameron Hodge and she tore apart her own form rather than let Hodge harm the X-Men. In her last, dying moments she confessed her love for Warren Worthington.

WORST STORY: NEW DEFENDERS #130, with Candy Southern taken hostage. She's not that kind of hero's girlfriend.

More to come! Stay tuned for 10-6!

What I love and hate about the Golden Age of Comics

An undead ghoul colossus towers like a god over a nightmare world at war, strutting over a battlefield and gazing on the misery, disease, genocide and corpses.

I'll never get over the contrast between that image and the peppy title, MORE FUN COMICS.

That's why I love the Golden Age: startling, evocative and dark covers that rival the luridness of the weirder pulp magazines.

On the other hand...well, the second image needs some introduction.

I love superheroes. There are only two that I actually hate, one of them is Kitty Pryde and the other is Captain Fucking Marvel. His disgusting adventures are the worst ever written in the entire genre, an embarassment and shame, a permanent black eye in the entire industry.



In case anyone wonders if the above scene is taken out of context, take it from someone that has read a few CM books in my time: every moment in Captain Marvel is like this. Every. Single. One.

The experience of reading CM comics can best be described as dying, going to hell, and discovering the devil is Austin Powers and he's trapping you forever in one of his movies.

No reason is given for why CM is even at a Beauty Pageant as a judge.

No reason is given why Captain Marvel has to measure a woman's forearm at a Beauty Pageant.

Finally, in order for a woman to have a forearm 29 inches long, she would have to be over seven feet tall.

FAIL.

The coming of the Arockalypse

Like lots of angry loners and fire-obsessed American youth, I went through a phase where I was into Heavy Metal. The angry, industrial sound expressed my state of mind, and the dark, supernatural and nightmarish themes delighted me as much as the guitar solos.

Eventually I stopped being a metal fan. Nothing happened, I just grew up.

But imagine my great joy to find the Finnish metal band Lordi, who can best be described as Gwar, except not a joke. They're like a time travel trip back to the eighties; for one thing, they're actually accused of worshipping the devil! (Ahhh, memories.)

Check out their "Hard Rock Hallelujah." It actually features such words as "On the Day of Rockening" and "the Arockalypse." I defy you to watch it and not end up pumping your fist righteously at the chant of "Hard. Rock. Hallelujah."



This is one of the few songs I'd actually like to see live: to experience their righteous pump-notes with an audience has to be something, even if it means the usual perils of experiencing a metal show live: some asshole doing a chicken dance in giant tracked boots and avoiding vomit-covered curbs and leathery, tattoo-covered white trash gorgons that just touching is enough to give a lethal STD.

The sheer, hilarious chutzpah of another one of their songs is worth listening to, if only for the lyric, "The Devil is a loser and he's my bitch."

Check it out:



By the way, the one great thing about Finnish metal bands is, considering that country's history, it's the only kind of metal band that you know won't give you a concept album centered around their love of all things Tsarist Russia.

If you've seen one Lordi video, you've pretty much seen them all, incidentally: they end up terrorizing some place with someone commanding armies of zombies.

By the way, speaking of Finnish metal bands, am I the only one that's noticed how much better the "new" Nightwish is, now that they've gotten rid of Tarja?

Have a look at their first video, Tarja-less:



Boy, more than anything else I've ever said on this blog, I know I'm going to catch hell for saying that Nightwish is better off without Tarja. For many, Tarja IS Nightwish. But I've always hated her: here was this righteous guitar and drum sound, and there was this spectral ghost diva yodeling over all of it.

"Symphonic Metal." Doesn't roll off the tongue, does it? The very name itself contains exactly what the problem was. It's like when I heard about the bombing of the Islamabad Mariott. The very nature of the problem could be expressed by the fact they blew up the Islamabad Mariott.

Incidentally, I've always found it amusing that Nightwish is the only metal band I've encountered where nearly all the fans of it I know are gay men and female. It's like they're attempting to steal the coveted title of "Official Artist of all Broken People Everywhere" from Enya.

It's not that I have a problem with metal that has a melodic component. Quite the contrary, actually...my favorite group always was the melody-heavy Judas Priest. Metal is always better at the two ends of the extreme: melodic groups like Judas Priest, and then percussion heavy groups like Slayer. The groups that try to strike a balance usually suck, much like post-Master of Puppets Metallica.

So, the problem isn't melody. The problem is, as long as Nightwish had Tarja, they always ended up sounding like New Age crap. This is inarguably true; you could play Nightwish's Gethsemane over the loudspeakers at a craft store and I guarantee nobody would notice. It would fit right in!

You might say the Pretty Young Thing they got to replace Tarja (and who looks a lot like her - gives me a real Single White Female vibe!) doesn't have that much vocal range, and you'd be right. But that's missing the whole point. The dirty little secret of rock is that the vocalist isn't that important. In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of really standout hard rock vocalists, except maybe the obvious choice of Freddie Mercury, who was louder than the group itself. They got a robot that won't outsing the band, and that's ultimately for the best.

Star Trek aliens I'd like to see more of

As a result of the fact Star Trek is a television show, a low information density medium, we often end up not learning much about any of the alien races and their culture. Sure, the Klingons got their "Heart of Glory," where we learned exactly how they thought, how they looked at the world and behaved, but there are many other races that didn't receive that kind of characterization or development. For instance, despite their regular and persistent use, I don't think the Romulans have ever received their "Heart of Glory." This, despite the fact they have been a part of the Star Trek universe from the beginning (they've actually been around slightly longer than the Klingons!) and were the main villains of two movies.


1. Deltans


It's easy to overlook the Deltans, because they never made any appearances beyond their initial one. For one thing, the idea was modified and became the Betazoids for TNG. Second, they are associated with "The Motion Picture," a very unpopular part of Trek lore.

But the Deltans are interesting and shouldn't be discarded. For one thing, they are a culture that considers humans to be "sexually immature." What exactly does this mean? What would a "sexually mature" society, one that has "grown up" about sex, actually be like?

Consider: there are a ton of euphemisms in our language for sex and sexual body parts (penises, breasts), and also for death. This isn't a coincidence, since cultures always create a myriad of terms to not directly discuss something they're not comfortable with.

As fundamentally sensual beings, the Deltans were actually very different from Betazoids. For one thing, according to the Gene Roddenberry novelization, Kirk always periodically imagined Ilia naked uncontrollably, for instance. No wonder they had to take a vow of celibacy!



2. Zakdorn



We first see the Zakdorn in "Peak Performance," and we learn almost everything we know about them from that episode: they're considered the greatest natural tactical minds in the universe, yet they haven't been in an actual combat for a very long time, because their reputation prevents possible aggressors from attacking them.

Mr. Worf contemptuously said, "If it isn't tested, their reputation is meaningless." Perhaps Worf is right, but I would have liked to see.

It's hard to say what the Zakdorn are actually like, or what a "garden variety" Zakdorn temperment is, as we've only really seen two: one was the swishy, excitable, arrogant Kolrami from "Peak Performance," and the other was a completely heterosexual junkyard owner in "Unification" that seemed like he was perpetually on Valium. Kolrami was able to defeat Data at a game like Stratagema because there were only a limited number of moves possible and Kolrami could antipate them all...however, when Data redefined his objective (to just fight to a draw) the game continued perpetually because Kolrami couldn't figure out his opponent's intentions.

This seems to be the way to defeat the Zakdorn, despite their very scary tactical edge: their weakness isn't so much that they are startled by unexpected tactics, which doesn't seem like a problem they'd have, but rather, their ability to out-think enemies comes from understanding their motives. If you can "fake out" a Zakdorn, or make them think you want something other than what you really want, you could probably out-think them.

One possible opportunity to use the Zakdorn emerged during Deep Space Nine: what if the Zakdorn, like the Breen and Cardassians, defected to become members of the Dominion? Now that would have been terrifying, to have the Dominion charging into battle led by the greatest strategic minds. For that matter, where were the Zakdorn, anyway? You'd imagine the Federation would have asked for their help in the greatest military problem in Federation history.

One thing I loved about Deep Space Nine was the feeling that during the Dominion War, there was a feeling a million things were going on at the same time. For the first time, the Trek universe acquired scope. This was in contrast to Voyager, where I never really believed in the Delta Quadrant; it was like the space Voyager passed through ceased to exist after they left!

One of the more impressive opportunities not pursued was the conquest of Betazed. I mean, here's a famous planet known for being sensualist and sexy, and they've been taken over by a group as ruthless as the Dominion. Surely there's a story there...



3. Tholians


The Tholians, like the Breen, were mentioned far more than they actually appeared. Which is a shame, because they're a fascinating opportunity, a "villain" race with a pedigree going back to the Original Series. This is extremely rare, because the overwhelming number of recurring alien races the original Trek gave us were usually pretty ridiculous looking, to the point where later incarnations of Trek went out of their way to not use or even mention them.

Take the Andorians, for instance. The writers of TNG deliberately stated in no uncertain terms on a number of occasions that there were no Andorians on the Galaxy-class Enterprise. There was even an interview with a head writer on TNG, when asked if any Andorians would show up on TNG, "Sorry, we don't do antennae on this show." I certainly don't mourn the loss of the Andorians, and in fact I'm a little baffled by their use in Enterprise. No matter how much goodwill one has towards the original series, no matter how much fondness or admiration, it will not change the fact that the Andorians look absolutely silly. A lesson on the dangers of nostalgia that many members of other fandoms have yet to learn, but I digress.

As for the Tholians, not only did they have a great look (or at least they were suggested to look really strange), they were sincerely menacing and mysterious, and had the good luck to appear in one of the most memorable episodes of the original series. The Tholians are, further, something very, very rare in Star Trek: an alien race that truly is alien. At times it seems that the "alien races" are just substitute human cultures. One critique of the Star Trek universe is, like the universes of Foundation or Dune, it could be rewritten so that all the alien races are different human civilizations spread across the universe, and very little of the Trek universe would have to be changed.

Often, real-world human cultures were used as the basis for Star Trek aliens: the Klingons are equal parts Japanese and Norse, and the Ferengi are even explicitly compared to 19th Century Yankee traders. While the Romulans derive their names from Rome, their culture is more like the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th Century, a world ruled in equal parts by the military and the secret police.

The exception are the Borg, who have a radically different basis that is only possible by science fiction, who are much more what alien races are like in written, serious science fiction.

One of my favorite ideas for the Tholians came from Peter David's New Frontier Trek novels. The Tholians experience time in a nonlinear fashion, radically different from other species. For instance, when the Tholians attack a ship without obvious provocation, it may be not be because of something they have done, but something that they are going to do in the future.

Incidentally, I always thought the "updated" makeup designs in Enterprise looked silly. The CGI "Jurassic Park" Gorn, for instance, looked especially laughable. But in the case of Tholians, they was nothing short of spectacular. My reaction was "oh, so that's what they looked like, all along!"


4. Nausicaans

The Nausicaans made quite an impression when they showed up in "Tapestry" as the silent, brooding bruisers that stabbed Picard from the back and caused him to need his artificial heart. They were something that few Trek villains often become: truly intimidating, able to arouse fear. It would be fascinating to see them again. It was often mentioned in later series that the Nausicaans were used as hired thugs, bodyguards and muscle for criminal operations, a role that somehow suits them perfectly.

In fact, it's really very strange we haven't seen these guys much, considering how powerful their debut was, and how hard-up TNG was for new enemies. All but one of their appearances (just let me get to that) featured the same Nausicaan hardcore mystique: my personal favorite was the scene in Quark's bar where the Nausicaans amused themselves by throwing darts at the chest of one of their own (who it should be said, took it like a champ)!

Yes, I am aware there was an episode of Enterprise that featured the Nausicaans, but like everything Enterprise, it took the potential of these new villains and squandered it. For one thing, they colored the Nausicaans pink and made them much smaller! Even the makeup was different; they looked much more like ridiculous parrotmen.


5. Bynars


What was really amazing was, the Bynars were pushed forward in a lot of early TNG promotional material as one of the new aliens created for the series, along with the Betazoids and Ferengi.

This makes their absence all the more puzzling from every episode except their debut. I mean, they couldn't just have a few Bynar pairs running around in a toolbelt fixing things in corridor shots, on starbases or ships? They couldn't put a couple Bynars in a Federation Council chamber or diplomacy room? (Yes, I'm aware it was never technically stated the Bynars were Federation members, but still.)

The reason I like the Bynars is because they have a truly alien culture and biology as opposed to just being Japanese Samurai or Communists in outer space. They view all information in terms of 0 or 1. All of them are linked to a massive computer network on their planet, and they live as identical pairs that complete each other's sentences, and even their names are in binary code. Surely something can be done with a race that unique.

Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream"

I've always loved science fiction and adventure stories, and I like them enough to take them seriously, to think about them, and occasionally, to be alarmed by some of the more disturbing assumptions built into them: the veneration at force, for instance, and the Totally Evil Alien Race, where we cheer the hero on when he kills them, often to the point of extermination.

This brings me to Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream," a book by counterculture "New Wave" author Norman Spinrad, who wrote one of my all time favorite science fiction stories, "A True Drug Culture," about an entire society that is under the influence of drugs near-constantly, tackling a taboo topic that receives blanket condemnation by censors, a subject it's hard to imagine John W. Campbell and his stable even considering. Norman Spinrad has always been one of my favorite science fiction writers, edgy and controversial the way people in the sixties and seventies often were, a real contrast to our play-it-safe culture. Another of my favorites was the politically loaded "Bug Jack Barron," which was about an American media pundit, sort of like a morally principled version of Bill O'Reilly, that encouraged political debate on his show.

In short, Norman Spinrad was the guy that best personified what was happening in science fiction in the 1970s: its ability to be experimental and edgy, defying the traditional science fiction stories that were penned by the hundreds in the 1940s and 1950s featuring cigar chomping, wisecracking badasses that use dubious engineering to solve their problems.

Norman Spinrad was one of the chief writers of Moorcock's "New Worlds" anthology, and it's interesting to compare Spinrad to Moorcock, not the least of which because in the late period of their career they started to write historicals as opposed to straight up science fiction: Moorcock with "Mother London" and Spinrad with things like "Mexica."

Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" is a novel with a twist: it is a book supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, who in an alternate history didn't go into politics and never became Furher of Germany, and instead moved to the United States where he was involved in early science fiction fandom first as a cover artist, and finally as a writer. In addition to the pulpy, intentionally bad novel "Lord of the Swastika" written by Hitler, the book also sports a parody of science fiction academic reviewers, and fake blurbs from other writers, like "Hitler, in his debut novel is electric!" There's even a fake ad for buying other books by science fiction novelist Adolf Hitler, all with malevolent sounding titles like "Tomorrow the World" and "The Master Race."

Here's the rub, the big joke, the giant irony behind Spinrad's book: it isn't different at all from any other adventure, pre-1960 science fiction or Sword & Sorcery novel! It has the same steely-eyed hero with big muscles, a magnificent and unwavering sense of destiny and purpose, with enemies that are vile, subhuman monsters.

As Ursula K. Le Guin put it: "The prose style is prudish and stiff. There are no women at all, no dirty words, no sex of any kind: the book is a flawless example of clean obscenity. It will pass any censor, except the one that sits within the soul." The book isn't so much a parody of Hitler and Nazism, but of the entire escapist adventure genre, which loudly claims to be without realism or political content but is nonetheless loaded with ideology, such as the role of the innately superior man, the superiority of militarism and muscular, authoritative action over careful intellectual consideration and diplomacy.

I'm sure the prudish Robert E. Heinlein fans and Alpha Male worshippers will find much to admire in "Hitler's" novel, as lots of people just don't get the joke, especially those prone to fooling themselves about how certain escapist and cynically produced adventure books have no political content or statement. There was one fanzine reviewer in the 1970s that talked about how "Lord of the Swastika" was a rousing adventure yarn, but spoiled by all this stuff afterwards about Hitler. The hero of "Lord of the Swastika," Feric Jagger, is a laughably invincible superman. That's the whole spirit of the book: Ferric Jaggar is an idealized "Mary Sue" wish-fulfillment character for Adolph friggin' Hitler, and yet, he is really no different than any other Sword & Sorcery or Sci-Fi alpha dog hero. That sort of discomfort is the most thought-producing aspect of the book.

Norman Spinrad really lays it on thick: at once point it describes the hero in such loving detail it was laughably homoerotic, talking about his large muscles and sexual presence. Here's the weird part: his intentionally homoerotic description is actually no different than the many times that Edgar Rice Burroughs lovingly describes Tarzan's "nut brown body with the curves of a Greek god."

It goes without saying that Hitler's book is intentionally awful. The violence is so lurid and over the top it's a type of war-porn. The book is filled with creatures like pinheaded mutants, malevolent, mind controllers and giant ameobas with hundreds of jibbering mouths and thrashing tentacles.


In the end, the book is interesting because it places moral demands on the reader, which many Westerns and other books don't: villains are villains and Must Be Killed. It also lampoons a mentality among fans of genre fiction that I just don't get. One of my ex-girlfriends that loved Romance novels but despised generic, formulaic bodice-rippers and stupid virgin female heroines, talked about how annoyed she was by other romance novel readers, how they always say something like "oh, I don't care much for realism, it's all supposed to be a fantasy anyway."

In the end, the political statement of "The Iron Dream" is intertwined with its parody/critique of genre fiction that goes beyond S&S and science fiction pulp. In the end, truly formulaic science fiction and adventure stories don't have any value. The greatest function of crap is to inure the reader to more crap...something I was just thinking about when I saw reviews for Transformers 2 where apologist critics knuckle under to the proles and teens that made that film a box-office hit and say it was a good example of formulaic genre fiction, and so forth.

Finally, I think it's worth noting that science fiction has really cast out the idea of the idealized, fifties style alpha male Heinlein father figure. I recently reread S.M. Stirling's recent novel, Island in the Sea of Time, about how the island of Nantucket finds itself transported back to the Bronze Age, and what struck me as extraordinary was the main villain of the novel, if it was written back in the 1960s, would have been its hero: he was a clear-eyed idealist, handsome and muscular, that never questioned his own actions or explained himself, and the very qualities that would have made him heroic in fifties fiction make him malevolent and frustratingly intransigent in modern times.

The Legend of Julian

I don't like to use this blog to talk about myself, an activity I always thought was self-absorbed, however, this time it's important and significant enough to mention.

First, you might have noticed there are more updates than normal, as the school year has wrapped up.

Second, the Peace Corps responded to my application. The good news is, I've been nominated to a program in Eastern Europe to teach the English language. Right now I'm in the process of doing my health, dental and psychological forms. Their background checks did turn up a few little gremlins, but nothing I'm terribly worried about as entirely significant. The good news is, I will probably be shipping out thereabouts the end of summer. After that, I'll promise to spend part of this blog with updates and photographs from my new location.

David Gerrold and the Birth of "The Next Generation"

Here's a great promotional clip from 1987 where Entertainment Tonight interviews David Gerrold, who was, in almost every sense the co-creator of Star Trek: The Next Generation.





Almost every idea that, from the outset, defined TNG as distinct from its predecessor was Gerrold's idea, not Roddenberry's:

• Families living aboard a starship;

• The First Officer should lead landing parties, so as not to place the Captain in any danger;
  


• The office of a ship's therapist or counselor;
  


• The idea of a Klingon on the bridge.

There are probably a few more I'm forgetting. That last one was an idea that Roddenberry resisted for an extremely long time; Worf was actually the last member of the bridge crew to be cast. Indeed, there are some early promotional materials that don't include Worf at all.

In fairness, there were a few ideas that Gerrold wrote that didn't make it to the series. One of them (years before SeaQuest!) was that the Galaxy-class Enterprise would have giant tanks to hold dolphins and whales, for both research, and to allow the cetaceans to work as navigators, made easier by their natural ability to think in three dimensions. Apparently, TNG held Cetacean intelligence very highly, if they were actual parts of the crew. I'm actually kind of glad this ideas wasn't used, as it would have dated the series terribly. The faddish American love of all things dolphin reached a crazy feverishness in the late 1980s.

In some ways, what happened in the first series of TNG was understandable. Gene Roddenberry had the Star Trek movies taken away from him after the cost overruns of The Motion Picture, where he had to acept the humiliating credit, "Creative Consultant." In fact, I remember hearing the idea for what Gene's version of Star Trek II would have been like: it would have involved Klingons going through the Guardian of Forever to assassinate JFK, which sounds as goofy as some of the silliest episodes of the original series, where Kirk battled evil alongside Abe Lincoln.

One of the biggest not-so-secret secrets of Star Trek (along with Wesley being Picard's son and Shatner wearing a rug) was that Gene Roddenberry was responsible for the plot leaks during production of Star Trek II, which he did to whip up fan outrage over the death of Spock. Nichelle Nichols, Gene Roddenberry's mistress during his first marriage, explained and defended Gene's actions on this point. Still, Gene vowed that if he got the chance, he would do HIS Trek, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy controlled his series with paranoid zeal that alienated a lot of the people that worked there, who claim Roddenberry took sole credit.

This is why it is so surprising to see a TV spot with David Gerrold. Writers have described First-Season TNG as an armed camp, with Roddenberry against the writers’ room. People that have worked on Star Trek for decades, including Dorothy Fontana and David Gerrold (arguably TNG’s co-creator) left Trek at this time. There was one very moving scene, remembered by Gerrold, where he once found Roddenberry face-down on his desk, weeping, and said “all of my friends have abandoned me.”

It’s obvious this atmosphere didn’t affect TNG for the better. The First Season of Next Generation was mostly unwatchable and boring. Everything the critics said about TNG was mostly true: it wasn’t a worthy sequel to the original series. The gigantic, unreal popularity of TNG was at least a season or two away.

Chelo Alonso, the Cuban H-Bomb

One person I was always fascinated by was Cuban burlesque dancer turned movie star Chelo Alonso. Che Guevara personally tried to convince her to return to Cuba after the Revolution, without success; she acted in films with directors Sergio Leone and Mario Bava, and starred alongside Steve Reeves.


Chelo Alonso, in the fifties and sixties left Cuba for Paris, where she performed at the famous Burlesque club, the Folies-Bergères. She was billed as "the Cuban H-Bomb," Josephine Baker for a new generation, who combined the traditional bump n'grind of the revue with Afro-Cuban rhythms. I've often been intrigued by a lot of the Cuban performers that took residence in Europe. The most famous of course was Jazz pianist Bebo Valdés, who moved to Stockholm and spent several decades performing Cuban Jazz piano concerts there.


Chelo Alonso later went to Italy for film parts and most people know her for THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, where she was mute and delivered no dialogue. Chelo spent a career playing the exotic evil queen, particularly during the Peplum boom. In fact, Chelo Alonso even acted alongside Steve Reeves himself in GOLIATH AND THE BARBARIANS. One of my personal faves was MACISTE IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, where she played a seductive, evil Cleopatra-like dark villainess.

The Marx Brothers movies always had an interlude where where the rowdy comedy family would pause the screwball stunts and Harpo would sit down to play a harp as beautifully as an angel. Likewise, there was always a scene where they'd let Chelo Alonso dance.

Take a look:

Chelo's looks come from her mixed parentage, equal parts Mexican and Cuban. It's interesting to note that in Cuba of the 1950s, Mexican movies were shown and played as often as American ones, and being Mexican was associated with glamour and exoticism. This is in very real contrast to the United States, where people of Mexican background are often exploited for labor. In fact, I remember that my Grandpa and Grandma used to tell people they were Mexican! One of the best existing photographs of my grandmother has her with her hair done-up Princess Leia-style in elaborate braids, in imitation of the Mexican peasant woman style.

Chelo Alonso is a reminder of the glory of Old Havana: a sinful and vice-filled society that no longer exists, done away by the austere and fun-hating Revolution. I've often thought there are fundamentally two types of government, and labels like "right" and "left" are a poor way to make this distinction. It's a great irony that the Christian Right would, if given absolute power, create a society indistinguishable from the atheistic, Marxist Cuban Revolutionaries.

Rather, the distinction should be between dirty, vice-filled societies that believe in live-and-let-live, and the ironically more crooked ones created by nosy, sanctimonious busybodies, hypocrites, puritans and moralists.

Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: Star Trek

As this is a pop culture and adventure fiction blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the biggest pop culture and adventure fiction event of summer 2009, the STAR TREK movie.

The long and the short of it was that it was pretty darn good. For J.J. Abrams and his writing staff to devote time and effort to setting this movie up as an "alternate timeline" with an actual relationship to traditional Star Trek (as opposed to just a cold reset-button pushing) was a pretty classy decision that respected Trek. I didn't realize this at the time, obviously, but I later read that they even put an effort to keep the stardates in this film consistent with the stardates in the original series. What's more, the movie had a sense of humor and the characters were recognizably themselves...everyone felt "on."

My favorite character from the series, Dr. McCoy, was played with a snap and teeth by Karl Urban, who plays him as a cynical, sarcastic guy and easily the most entertaining member of the crew. Chris Pine does a bang-up job as a Captain Kirk, though I always thought Shatner was a campy, hammy actor, sort of like Adam West only without the comic timing, so he had pretty small shoes to fill there.

In the wake of all the branched-off Trek series like Enterprise and Voyager that just exhausted everyone, it was easy to forget exactly what it was that made Star Trek so great in the first place: the characters. People like the characters and root for them. I've often wondered why Star Trek had such a downright unreally huge set of fans, when other shows from its era (even science fiction shows) have mostly been forgotten (for instance, who today watches, or even remembers, the Ron Ely Tarzan, which premiered the same evening that Trek did?). I think part of it had to have been the great chemistry the actors had, the friendship and warmth and sense of cameraderie. Experiencing this sort of feeling, even vicariously, can be very, very powerful to lots of young people. As Fry put it in FUTURAMA, "Growing up, I didn't have any friends, but STAR TREK made me feel like I did."

Roger Ebert wrote a great review of Star Trek Nemesis where he wrote about how just plain tired all this stuff had gotten. One example he used was the damn forcefield around the Enterprise, where every battle seemed to involve someone counting down the percentage ("shields at 30%!") and how they had to reroute power from the sides to the forward deflector shields or whatever the hell. In this movie, Star Trek is actually exciting: space battles cause explosions and fireball death, and instead of just shaking the camera, cracks form in the metal of the ship itself. Even Warp Speed feels new: the jump effect, in addition to the "thump" sound, actually made the standard jump visually intriguing for the first time. One of my personal favorite effects, and a deliberate throwback to the original series, was the scale-placement of a tiny USS Enterprise near huge, monstrous spaceships and other objects to emphasize the Enterprise's comparative smallness.

The movie was obviously written by a fan. They remembered Sulu was a skilled fencer with a love of swashbuckling, and give him a great sword to boot. They remember that Christopher Pike was the first Enterprise Captain, or Uhura's little silver earring that she wore as a part of her communications duties. A red-shirted crewman gets vaporized as a part of the landing party. They even have a few gags based on Kirk's middle name being Tiberius (a gift given by the Animated Series, incidentally, but more on that later).

It was great they had Uhura as a competent, smart character that actually plays a role in the story as opposed to being a glorified secretary.

The one casting choice that disappointed me was the one I was the most excited about in the beginning, namely Zachary Quinto (Sylar!) as Spock. I didn't realize it until Leonard Nimoy himself showed up, but Quinto lacks Spock's deep voice that lent gravitas to the character, as well as Nimoy's oddball creepiness that made him a natural for unsolved mystery show host duties. Instead of the contained rage that made Nimoy so successful, Quinto more openly expressed emotion to the point where Spock felt more uptight than self-controlled. Worse, except for one great scene at the beginning, Spock just didn't feel all that alienated and lonely: whereas he often stood apart from the Enterprise's mostly human crew if not actively resented (have a look at at "The Galileo Seven"), here Spock is a mostly respected mentor-figure.

The other actor I didn't much care for was Simon Pegg. While the very skilled Karl Urban made a real attempt to duplicate McCoy faithfully, and all the other characters from Pine to Quinto made an attempt to play their characters consistently with their previous characterizations, Simon Pegg went off in a totally different direction that was so "movie comic relief" that he didn't feel like Scotty at all.

The narrative conceit of time travel creating a new timeline felt hoary and overdone, but at least it energized the series with a real sense anything could happen. The movie was truly unpredictable. The one character I fingered as a dead man walking was Christopher Pike...and astonishingly, he actually lives to the end. Christopher Pike lived and Vulcan was destroyed, which is the exact reverse of what I expected would happen.

(I usually try to keep these spoiler-free, but I'm doing this review late so everybody that has an interest in seeing it has probably seen it by now.)

One of the great rules of writing tie-in novels was that you couldn't actually destroy anything important. The decision to blow up Vulcan midway through the film was shocking, because I thought the planet wasn't in danger.

All in all, STAR TREK reminded me of why I like this stuff in the first place. It actually got me scrambling to watch DVDs and list my favorite Trek moments.


GREATEST STAR TREK MOMENTS

1. "Haven"

Part of the reason the Troi-Riker relationship never went anywhere was because how little chemistry there was between Marina Sirtis and John Frakes. Don't get me wrong, both of them are skilled actors, but chemistry requires something unpredictable that those two just didn't have.

The reason I liked Haven was not because of the one thing about it that everyone remembers, namely the introduction of Lwaxana Troi. Lots of people found her annoying. I feel the same way, but that actually works for the character: she reminds me of some of my own relatives. The element of Haven I thought that worked the most was the story involving Wyatt teleporting over to the ship containing the last of the Tarellians, who were all dying of an infectious plague, in the hopes of curing them. I thought it was an extremely powerful ending, but more than that, has greater than normal potential for sequels. What happened to Wyatt and the Tarellians? Did he cure them? Did he die with them? What?

2. The Animated Series

What I always found surprising was that the Animated Series wasn't considered canon over at Paramount. Downright shocking, even, because it was a denial of reality: the animated series introduced valuable pieces of information that have been gospel as it gets ever since, from Spock's childhood (the city he grew up in has been mentioned frequently, as has Spock's pet giant teddy bear) to Robert T. April, to the idea that Tiberius was James Kirk's middle name.

The lack of canonicity of the Animated Series was in general, part of the overall shabby treatment that incarnation of Trek received. It was totally ignored and not even mentioned once, even in passing, in the 25th Anniversary Special and the 30th Anniversary celebration. Leonard Nimoy doesn't even mention it in I AM SPOCK. I have yet to read a single Trek behind-the-scenes book that had the decency to talk to Lou Scheimer about his contributions to the Star Trek legend. In general, the overall narrative among Star Trek fans is that the seventies was a "lost decade" where Trek only had syndicated reruns, conventions and no new material to slake their thirst for things Trek. An astonishing attitude, considering an entire series was produced in that era.

This view of Trek history, nothing more than chauvanism to a "mere cartoon," becomes even more startling when you consider the original cast played their original roles, the series was made under Gene Roddenberry's watch, and many scripts were written by original series writers like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana (and even science fiction great Larry Niven). All of them were writing and working at the best of their ability and produced brassy, thick science fiction of a kind not seen since the show's second season. What's more, the animated series featured Trek standbys like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, and the Guardian of Forever. The animated series obsessively duplicated the details of the bridge and the look of the ship, and created something near-identical to its visual look. For heaven's sake, this show was even set during the original 5-year mission. If this stuff isn't canon, then nothing is.

In some ways, this series is something of an improvement over the original Trek. For one thing, animation has an infinite special effects budget, and this series showed it: with monsters like the slug creatures that thought the Enterprise crew were pets, to the winged snake-god Kukulkan who looks like an airbrushed van design mixed with a peyote-hallucination (only in the seventies!) and other winged, fanged things that fly and slither on all-water planets and hostile volcanic ones. The episode set on the living, corpuscle-filled organic spaceship made the wobbly sand-filled sets of the original even more embarassing. I have no idea why the series is ignored: animation has a real ability to bring Star Trek to life in a way even live action can't.


3. My brother IRL-Trolls Wil Wheaton

According to the way he tells the story, around the early to mid nineties back when the family still lived in New York, my brother was taking a cab down Lexington Avenue. Because the traffic was intense, the car stopped frequently, and once stopped beside a couple movie theaters. Out of one of them, my brother saw Wil Wheaton, Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in the history of Star Trek, emerge from a movie theater with his date.

My brother unrolled the windows and cried, "Hey, Wil Wheaton!"

The little dweeb turned around and grinned, thrilled to be recognized, especially in front of a date.

To which my brother shortly after shouted "...you fucking putz!"



4. Maurishka Taliaferro

Maurishka Taliaferro, credited on-screen as Maurishka, may be one of the most historically significant guest-stars in Trek history. Maurishka was an exotic and successful model that was a huge fan of the series, who used her clout to get herself a role on the show itself, the relatively unmemorable Yeoman Zahra. What was even more amazing is, this was all the way back in Operation: Annihilate, the last episode of the very first season!

Maurishka was the first celebrity to use their clout to get a cameo role on Star Trek, a category that would later include Mick Fleetwood, Whoopi Goldberg, the Rock, and Tyler Perry.


5. Della van Hise's KILLING TIME

It's no secret that lots of the writers of the first wave of Star Trek novels got their start as writers of homoerotic slashfic. In fact, it's actually pretty amazing, since the writers of the series were overwhelmingly female. In fact, the term "Trekkie" originally started with writers of slash, a variation on "groupie." This, incidentally, is why many male fans prefer the more masculine "Trekker."

What was even most astonishing is that the first draft of Della van Hiise's manuscript was accidentally published, which was not only unintentionally, hilariously amateur in craft, but also sported tons of slash elements in an actual, mainstream novel: the warmth of Kirk and Spock's fingers as they mind-meld, and the stated idea that Kirk was Spock's true love. Creepy and hilarious, it is definitely one of the top Trek moments.



6. "Who Watches the Watchers?"

One theme of Trek that I always responded to was the idea that religion and superstition was pretty much flim-flam holding mankind's potential back. Trek operated under the humanistic view: mankind isn't perfect but it's the best we've got and we have nearly limitless potential. This view was articulated over and over, but never so explicitly as in "Who Watches the Watchers," a TNG episode that was, in its way, far more shocking than even the "queer" episode with the genderless aliens.

This is the one where a Starfleet observation post is discovered by Bronze-Age aliens who believe Picard is an omnipotent god and turn to worship him. Picard shows them the error of their ways. There was even a moment where an anthropologist encouraged Picard to abandon the Mintakans to their rediscovery of religion. Picard's eloquent response?

"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"

Sampo!

If you're a Finnophile like me, hearing about the 1960s movie SAMPO was mouth-wateringly exciting: a film dramatization of the Finn national epic, Kalevala (or at least a choice selection thereof). The film's American-edited version by American International Pictures cut over half an hour of footage from the film that has yet to be fully added. Most people are familiar with the shorter AIP cut when it aired in the U.S. as THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE, which aired on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It's not hard to understand why this movie would look insanely, hilariously bad despite its generally high production values. Mostly because of a Kung Fu flick level terrible dubbing job by American International Pictures, but I think it might have been that the intended American audience lacked any social context for the story so it all just looked schizophrenically insane and random.

At least SAMPO fared a lot better than another AIP hatchetjob, where they redubbed a Soviet movie about a Russian folk tale with a blond main character as SINBAD'S MAGIC VOYAGE. (???)

Still, though. When spoofing THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE, they could have laid off the Swedish and Norwegian jokes. The confusion between Scandinavian and Finnish/Estonian culture is really annoying. I guess Mike Nelson, Joel and the rest were Midwesterners, so everything vaguely arctic-circle and European looked Scandinavian to them!

Here's a great selection of how the film looked in its original Finnish:



Here are a couple of the "lost" scenes from SAMPO, from the German version. These feature a plot cut from the first version of the film, namely the murder and resurrection of Leminkainen.

Greek Mythology

Continuing the series on World Mythology, here's a take on Greece.

In the beginning, classical studies focused in on what made Greece so unusual and their stories so extraordinarily different from the cultures around them. The best book to typefy this was Edith Hamilton, whose perky insistence the Greeks were super-duper special was one of the most irritating parts of the otherwise splendid MYTHOLOGY.

This kind of triumphalism is unsurprising. Classical Studies have always been a darling of the conservative right, since after all, emphasizing the uniqueness of Western culture separates us from our two archenemies, namely the Godless Commies on one hand, and the assorted disgruntled darkie hordes of the Third World on the other.

When education forcused on Math and Science during the 1960s so America wouldn't lose her tech edge to the Commies, William F. Buckley Jr. urged us not to forget Classical Greece and the humanities, which may have been the only time the World's Most Articulate Asshole and his attack dogs in the National Review were ever in favor of anything that benefitted the human race. Likewise, don't forget Victor Davis Hanson, the Dick Cheney psycophant, discredited after his invocation of Greece to cheerlead Cheney's oil-grabbing misadventures. The truth is, there's nothing that could be less relevant to Iraq or Afghanistan than Classical Greece: the Greeks and Romans never had to deal with anything like an insurgency or asymmetrical warfare. Think of it like this: if a native population attacked Greek soldiers, what do you think the Greeks would have done...to the entire city?

Nowadays, the pendulum has shifted and classical scholars are looking at the similarities between the Greeks and other cultures around them. It certainly helps that we know a lot more about Greek prehistory, thanks to archeology revealing more about the Greeks Indo-European ancestors, the Bronze Age period, the Pelasgians (the non-Indo-European original inhabitants of mainland Greece), and the palace culture of Knossos. There was a wonderful travelogue book entitled ZEUS that traced the life's story and origins of Zeus in a Greek travel book, which investigated the Big Guy's origin in Indo-European and tribal belief.

With that in mind, there are a few things important to emphasize when reading Greek Mythology:

1. The institution of the hero came from Ancestor Worship.

In fact, the reason we are familiar with some heroes is because their cults were important at significant places...not the other way around! Castor and Pollux were a part of the state worship of Sparta, for instance. Some hero-cults were downright bizarre: on Samothrace, the Orphic Mysteries believed the hero-musician Orpheus emerged from the underworld with secret knowledge. Since the Orphic Mysteries were a secret society concerned with magic salvation, we know very little about them...but supposedly initiates in the Mysteries were protected from drowning.

In many ways, the Greek form of ancestor-worship was very similar to the Chinese, Aboriginal, and Sub-Saharan African version of the same practice. Ancestors weren't just the spirits of long-dead blood relatives, but superhuman figures from the distant past with real influence on present events.

It's important to note that Greece was divided into closely-related clans or tribes, called ethnos, rather like Scottish Highlanders. In some cases, being a part of one ethnos was, like the Clintons, Kennedys and Bushes today, a ticket to real political power. Each ethnos had its own hero that they claim descent from, which is what makes reading a lot of epics so dense and impenetrable: lots of little shout-outs to minor-league heroes that pop up just to give that portion of the audience a thrill.

The hero-ancestors had great importance for propaganda and political purposes. A hero's fame increased if the tribe he was related to came into power. After pan-Greek sentiment was the big uniting feeling after the Persian Wars, the previously unimportant hero Hellas was pointed to as a common ancestor for all Greeks everywhere.

2. Greek religion had a surprisingly dark flip-side with extremely ancient roots.

Called Cthonic worship, this type of worship was conducted underground and in caves, often with blood sacrifice to earth and death deities. Hecate, a moon goddess of magic and death, was one of the chief of the Cthonic gods. Hades was another. In fact, Hades was often associated with Zeus, either as a split personality or as a twin brother. The clear-cut separation between Zeus and Hades is a modern invention. Hades after all, was often referred to as Zeus Cthonios: the Cthonic Zeus.

3. The Greeks and Romans didn't take their myths seriously. They loved to lampoon, deconstruct, and usurp their own myths, even from the get-go.

The Byzantine Empress Theodosius, prior to marrying the most powerful man in the world, was a professional stripper who specialized in lewd and sexy reinactments of Greek and Roman myths.

This irreverence towards myth is typical of the classical world. It would be a mistake to call most Greeks and Romans atheists (a very modern attitude inappropriate for the Ancient World), but nonetheless the majority of them didn't believe in the literal truth of their myths and didn't take them all that seriously.

One of the great additions to Greek drama was the Satyr play, which were comic parodies of myths often performed in festivals to help the mostly drunk observers wind down after the super-pompous main performances generally shown at such festivals. The Satyr plays often remind me of the Abbot and Costello movies where the duo met Frankenstein or Hercules, with the goofy figures of the satyrs, horny to the point they sported comically oversized prop erections, were casually slipped into the myths like Forrest Gump. The only existing satyr play to come down to us in its entirety was by Euripides and featured a bunch of Satyrs caught up with Odysseus in his famous escape from the Cyclops. The most typical scene was one where the Cyclops threatened to capture and rape a satyr prison-style. Yes, the satyr plays are as totally hilarious as they sound.

In fact, the most readable and entertaining collection of Greek myth was Ovid's METAMORPHOSES. Ovid was wildly disliked because of this very humor, warmth and humanity. Augustus Caesar, like all prudes and snotty moralists the world over, had zero sense of humor and no tolerance for parody, and much preferred the boring, sterile and unreadable Virgil's AENEID (which not incidentally, kissed the ass of the ruling class and their values) rather than the subversive Ovid. Ovid was someone that actually did use humor as a deadly weapon to speak truth to power: aware of the corruption and indiscretion of the priesthood under Augustus (after all, one of the great ironies of human culture is how sexual perversion proliferates under repressed societies and becomes less frequent with more permissive ones) his book AMOR (which was ROMA spelled backwards!) mentions the Temple of Apollo as a great spot to pick up women. Apparently, the uptight Augustus was unamused: it's commonly believed Augustus Caesar ordered Ovid whacked. Of course, Ovid had the last laugh: his METAMORPHOSES is one of the most influential and widely read work in Western history, whereas Augustus Caesar is worm food. Presumably the devils in hell are right now ass-raping Augustus, and he's probably enjoying every moment of it.

Ovid's METAMORPHOSES is almost like a Mad-Magazine parody of Greek myth. When familiar figures in Greek myth appear, they are often bumbling, ineffective and entirely mortal. The only story featuring the Superman of Greek myth, Achilles, is one about the one time he proved himself impotent against the warrior Cygnus. In one humorous scene, after the battle with Cygnus, Achilles kills a guy just to see if he can still do it. Likewise, Apollo, god of reason and superhottie supreme, is shown as being irrational: crazy in love with Syrinx, a nymph that rejected him and turned into a tree to escape him. The only story with Hercules is one of his death. Nestor, the wise councilor of the heroes in the war against Troy, is shown in METAMORPHOSES as a senile Abe Simpson type that tells stories that go on weird, ranting tangents.

Ovid's stories are full of magnificent imagery, funny characters and imagery: the idea of dolphins swimming through forests after Zeus floods the world, for instance. METAMORPHOSES remains one of the only two books in college I didn't sell back to the bookstore after the course was over.