I'm not making a moral stand, I'm just a bit tired.

[alexsarll]

In Victoria HMV, there's a box set of all eight Alien and Predator films, including the two crossovers, for £15. It's shelved next to an earlier box set of what were at the time all seven Alien and Predator films, including the crossover. This costs £30. I know Alien vs Predator: Requiem is meant to be bad, but -£15 bad? And how much would a box with neither crossover cost?
(While musing on this, I caught an ad from the corner of my eye at Pimlico station, advertising Doctor Who - the Sylvester McCoy box set. Ooooh, how did I miss that? Turns out it's a Mock the Week ad with a list of 'Presents We Don't Want' or similar. Gits.

A bad week for icons; I have seen plenty of (richly deserved) tributes to Bettie Page and Oliver Postgate, but less about Forrest J Ackerman, superfan, inventor of the term 'sci-fi', honorary lesbian (this one was news to me) and inspiration to everyone from Ray Bradbury through Joe Dante to...well, pick someone cool, they were probably in his thrall. Rest in peace, all three of you.

Bands advertising tours on TV: is this normal? Genuine question, I don't watch much commercial TV these days, but it felt very odd when one of the breaks during the final Devil's Whore* incorporated a plug for Coldplay tickets. So odd, in fact, that it even bypassed the normal outrage I feel whenever reminded of this tour's existence - I am grudgingly prepared to forgive Coldplay's existence, but that they should reduce Girls Aloud and Jay-Z to support acts? Not acceptable.

"Gordon Brown has been called "Superman" in Parliament as the fallout from the prime minister's inadvertent claim to have "saved the world" continues. The Tories have been mocking Mr Brown after his slip of the tongue over the economy at Prime Minister's Questions...But Commons leader Harriet Harman told Tory MPs that she would "rather have Superman as our leader than their leader who is The Joker"."
1) Even by the standards of Parliamentary name-calling, isn't accusing the other side's leader of being a mass-murdering psychopath rather strong? I suppose there's always the remote chance that she appreciates the Grant Morrison perspective on the Joker's personality, whereby he has no essential 'self' and reinvents himself in line with each new circumstance; this would be a pretty good charge to level at Cameron, who has never really managed to articulate a stance or principle beyond 'I'm not the other guy'. Somehow, though, I doubt there's a copy of Arkham Asylum or 'The Clown at Midnight' on Harman's shelves.
2) Equally, I can only conclude that Harman has never read Kingdom Come, in which Superman's failure to confront the Joker with sufficient conviction leads to the death of Lois Lane, Superman's retirement, and the collapse of the superheroic age into carnage and anarchy.
3) At a simpler level, I think most of us would rather have Superman as party leader than The Joker. What her riposte signally fails to grasp is the difference between Superman, and an all-too-human leader who has made a slip of the tongue which looks very like it was as Freudian as it was hubristic.
(That third point is really banal, isn't it? And yet without it, the whole item looked that little bit too abstract/Comic Book Guy. Speaking of comics - I was a little worried about Phonogram series 2 starting with a Pipettes issue, but Seth Bingo's anti-Pipettes rant assuaged all my fears. Great comic, and the launch party wasn't too bad either. Yeah, get me with the schmoozing)

*Which was still a bit of a mess, wasn't it? Moments of genuine power eclipsed by the overall sensation of a story whose truncation made it didactic and rushed. Not to mention repetitive, in the way that over four episodes Angelica Fanshawe managed four deaths for four shagpieces. Has anyone yet written a crossover in which she turns out somehow to be an ancestor of Torchwood's Tosh and her Fanny Of Doom? If not - please don't.

Comments

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

It was the McCoy era when I first watched Who, I think. I remember finding some of it genuinely creepy and scary.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I had memories of seeing Who before, but McCoy was the first Doctor where I religiously watched it every week, and I similarly found it really impressive - and some of it still stands up now. His first series, when he was saddled with Bonnie Langford, is a bit of a turkey - but after that, it's mostly awesome.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Part of me wishes that we could have seen more of the Cartmel Masterplan on screen - but had it not been cancelled, we'd never have had the books, and while they may have been a second-best solution at the time, things were done there which you could never get away with on screen, even now.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

That was the problem - I lost Baker, I had the sort of crush only an 8 year old can on Peter Davison which made up a little bit THEN I GOT BAKER AND LANGFORD - people wonder why I cheered when it got cancelled. I don't think I consciously watched an Ace episode, although I must have.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Even Colin and Langford have managed some decent performances in the audio dramas, where they can escape from the ghastly production values and some of the worst writers in the show's history. And it's noticeable that even on audio dramas, where you can't see it, they made a point of getting the Sixth Doctor out of that dreadful coat.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

I got into Who during Trial of a Timelord, but I was only about 6 at the time, so I really didn't have much clue what was going on, so McCoy was "my" Doctor.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure that likewise, I watched the whole of Trial, without really grasping what was meant to be going on. I probably thought it would make sense when I was older. Easy mistake to make, eh?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Cor, I never knew that. I'd always assumed that you'd been an avid watcher from an early age.

I very clearly remember watching the last Baker T series when it was first shown. That and the first two series of Davison were my formative experiences of the Doctor - by the time Trial of a Timelord started, I was losing interest. The last story I recall watching all the way through was Remembrance of the Daleks. It's funny everyone hating on Mel so much: Ace was even worse in the episodes I saw.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

My memories of it all are pretty hazy. There are stories I know I saw live, like The Five Doctors, but others from when I'd have thought I was watching that spark no memories at all - including most Colin Baker pre-Trial; I can only presume I was one of those seduced away by The A-Team on the other side. And this even though I was already collecting the Target books, and distinctly remember getting Return of the Cybermen out almost as soon as we joined a video shop.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

I saw the Sylvester McCoy thing on the tube today too and thought 'Oooh maybe finally a chance to sort out my Sylvester angst - potentially at a cheap price' I didn't get close enough (it was at the far side so the small print rendered the joke useless) and do these people know their market AT ALL?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Maybe since that Mock the Week joke about the Queen almost spawned another Manuelgate, they've decided they might as well go down fighting and piss off as many people as possible while they can.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read the Guardian obit for "4e", and Neil Gaiman had a piece about him on his blog. One of the unsung fandom heroes of SF. He even invented the term SciFi, although I maybe wish he hadn't :-)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I prefer SF but hey, I think he can be forgiven that. I'm not so sure 'unsung' fits, because everyone within the field seems to be giving him the props he's due - it's just that the wider public has never heard of him. Perhaps understandable, given how hard it is to put a finger on quite what his contribution was in terms that can be explained - especially given how often 'biggest fans' are at least as much hindrance as help.

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

The first AvP film is basically AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS but with Predators as Elder Things and Aliens as Shoggoths. Oh, and incredibly irritating human leads who figure out impossible things at the drop of a hat just so the audience has a vague idea of what's going on. The 'Deathtrap Dungeon' pyramid is irredeemably silly too. Shame, because parts of the film are actually reasonably good. And there's a character named Verheiden in homage to Mark V., the author of the ALIENS comics.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Which parts of it are reasonably good? I'll give you the bit where the Predator's shuriken-thing gets a Facehugger in mid-air, but that is pretty much it.

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

I generally quite liked the abandoned whaling station bits at the start, with the red flares illuminating this creepy deserted place with bloody shadows. Shame that their Director of Photography then seemed to go awol for the next hour of the film, but oh well.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I became a fully-fledged Doctor Who fan during Trial of a Time Lord, I think? Before that it was Robin of Sherwood all the way. McCoy's is the greatest era of old Who, hands down. Season 24 is brilliant and hilarious, and differs greatly from 25 and 26 only in that someone realised that they should throw some random Daleks, Cybermen, Brigs and other such tosh into the mix in order to shut the rabid fanboys up. Greatest Show and Happiness Patrol > Remembrance, deep down.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I can see what they were trying to do with Happiness Patrol, but that just makes it so much more frustrating that they didn't quite get there.

And Light remains the best metaphorical portrayal of a fanboy I think I've ever seen.