November in June, Turkeys for all

We are turning over the log to Mummphm this time. He needs the experience and we have to keep him out of the shuttle for a while. It’s going to take days to remove all that cheese from the intake manifolds. Who knows what he was thinking?

Your month of November doesn’t really have much going for it unless you like turkey. And no need to tell us that it is your month of June. We travel using wormholes and it plays havoc with our calendars, not to mention our watches. Time is just a construct to be pushed anyway. But, wait, you don’t know that yet. Back to November which has either just been (assuming you think the glass to be half full) or is about to be (assuming you think the glass half empty), or, if you are exactly a half way kind of entity, both. But we digress. November follows the major US holiday of Halloween. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s full of turkeys. It’s the start of holiday decorations and shopping. It’s one of the longer months to spell. It celebrates the death of big birds. The food of the month is mostly odd colored stuff–purple, orange and brown. It presents us with one of the major ironies as we wrestle with comprehending the brief history of one of your superpowers, the USA. Here is what we have learned so far. Without the Indians, the Pilgrims would not have survived. By surviving, the Pilgrims brought on the genocide of the Indians. This has led to the word Tryptophan being repeated close to a gazillion times in a four day period. Frankly, we agree with Ben Franklin that the month is symbolized by the perfect animal, the turkey. But let us move to things we better understand–your DVD historical records And, speaking of such, let’s take a look at what’s lurking out there.

It’s the Great Bird of the Galaxy!

Sometimes you sit in your blind and wait and wait and wait and nary a gobbler comes passing through. Other times you’ve barely had time for your butt to get wet when the big bird presents itself.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Watch Kirk emote the Enterprise across the galaxy. Watch Spock raise his eyebrow. Watch Mr. Scott build an entire interociter from just pocket lint and a rubber band. Watch Mr. Sulu eye Uhura. Buy this now and you get the director’s restored version where he puts back in the 35 minutes of space footage thought to be too boring. Yikes, another 35 minutes of boring space footage?? This on top of two hours of boring other footage in what is little more than a rip off of one of the television episodes? And they thought we wouldn’t notice? Load the photon torpedoes we’re being hailed by space turkeys.

It’s a known fact that turkeys replicate. That’s right, replicate. If they mated then genetics would come into play and make better turkeys. And I’m not talking about bigger butterballs. An excellent case in point is “Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th”, which attempts to spoof not only every recent horror flick but every recent flick combined. This total lack of focus and utter reliance on sex jokes drives the few redeeming qualities the film had right from your frontal lobes. Klaarg liked it though.

And before you go thinking that all turkeys are tom turkeys let me present to you– Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. If you discount the lousy writing, the crappy directing, the negligible acting and plot holes so big you could fly turkeys through them you’ve got a pretty good film here. Sick with the game and leave this bird alone, it spent too much time out in the sun.

Wait, Lara Croft, Ronald Ashcroft, I see a connection. That would explain why The Astounding She-Monster, shares so many of the apparent values and production qualities. Actually it’s the other way around since this flick came out in 1958. Not a bad watch purely for old time’s sake, like when you’re with your buds talking about how good the turkey was two years ago.

You can always tell a real turkey by how little time it spends in view of the public. Turkeys are shy, retiring creatures and avoid people like the plague. Planet Of The Apes, the remade one, is an excellent example of this. So bad it lasted but days in the theaters and minutes in the second run houses it now comes to roost on your DVD player. Don’t let it roost very long.

Classics – or should we say…leftovers?

So, what’s a droog to do after loading up on all that tryptophan? Steal a car? Look for rival gangs to beat up? Break into a few houses and contemplate stuffing the occupants? How about all of the above, but only if you’re Alex or one of his friends from “A Clockwork Orange”. A classic masterpiece which, while a bit slow and dated now, still shows you how movies should be made. Not a feather in sight.

He’s alien and he’s come to Earth to…well, we’re not really sure. The guvment wants to kill him, science wants to study him and the ladies they just swoon at his gaze. “The Cosmic Man”, pretty much fills the bill if you’re looking for really old turkey. This one was moldy the day it got released so fair warning if you try to watch it now.

Turkeys are big birds that look kind of neat and taste really bland. “Willow”, shares these characteristics. Visually stunning, with great locations and some fine special effects, but all wrapped around a story that is not only old hat but nothing special to begin with.

SFTV – Dinners, reheated in our atomic powered microwave.

Must everything turn to turkey? Must all turkey turn to poison? Must all poison be bad for you? Unfortunately a resounding yes to all of the above. Check out the pre-turkey episodes of “Farscape”. “Durka Returns” and “A Human Reaction” are the episodes presented here. Excellent stuff, but be warned, there’s a turkey lurking in the not to far future.

At some point there are just too many of these things flying by and you just have to sit back in amazement. The “X-Files” is a great example of that. This is the complete fourth season. Like you need more X-files. Like the first three years, never mind the first three episodes, didn’t pretty much play out the storylines. There is the occasional interesting episode tucked in here amongst the dark and white meat, sort of like finding the giblets. Will Scully? Will Muldar? Will the smoking man? Who the hell cares?

“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or, how to not make movies. This one contains all the things you should never, ever do when making a film. The biggest turkey of the bunch.

Just to show that even science fiction writers love turkey, “Project Moon Base”, which was co-written by Robert Heinlein rears it’s ugly head. Two space babes get stranded on the lunar surface. Will they survive?? Jesus, what were you thinking, Bob?

Anime – Even Giant Robots can’t talk with their mouths full.

I hate to say it but of the 740 or so DVDs released in November of…we forget but we think there were some 0’s and 2’s in it, there wasn’t a single Anime one worth looking at. Actually there were incredibly few to look at period. Guess those giant mumblers know it’s best to hide when the big birds come out to play.

Incomprehensible

One of the measures used by the Galactic Council to determine a species readiness for entry into the Cosmic fraternity is creativity. The Council sends representatives to visit a planet and to study the culture, art and artifices produced. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out if what a species is producing is truly representative of their creative process or just something they’ve managed to cobble together out of boredom. Up until a few years ago we had high hopes for you third Earthers. But then it seemed as if any creativity you might have been using was simply an illusion. Let us illustrate. You no longer make original movies. You used to but not anymore. Now every movie is based on some book, some comic, some old movie, some game, some carnival ride, some event from your past, some radio show, or some movie which was just out. This is not original. Neither is it interesting. Frankly we have been more intrigued watching hedgehogs trying to negotiate a slippery slope than we have been watching your DVDs. Let us illuminate. Can it really be that this has not been released until now? How could you let such a classic slip by? How could you live without having the opportunity to view, over and over, the stunning special effects, the captivating writing and the wondrous score of The Black Hole? This was made during the period when Disney thought they knew what they were doing but were really just trying to figure out how the company which made Peter Pan and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea could have seemed to have forgotten how to make anything even remotely close to that quality. There are cute robots in this so we had to restrain Klaarg while we watched. We’re sorry now that we did since it would have saved us from having to watch all the way to the end Klaarg was a bit disturbed about the robot thing so when we sent him out to get a new pile of dvds he came back with Cheerleader Camp. It’s about a bunch of cheerleaders who go to camp and then start getting killed. Who can tell why? Certainly not Klaarg who seems to have taken a particular liking to the genre although he does get upset when they die due to their own stupidity as Klaarg thought cheerleaders were smart enough to know not to go out into the woods at night after a bunch of your friends have been murdered. Somehow he’s thinking it has something to do with robots trying to take their places and just not managing it well. If you Earthers spent as much time fixing the world you live on as you do in imagining it being different your lives would be much better. Sliders – The First And Second Seasons, shows where your true interests lie however as you’d rather slip from place to place, each just slightly different than where you came from just to you can get different flavored ice cream or square potato chips. Most of the events depicted on these discs have been done by other shows—Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Big Bass fishing with Martin Brundle—so we’re not sure why you spent the time or the energy in making these. In a move that would make sense only to you people a television show gets canceled because no one is watching it so the powers in charge then go ahead and make a series of movies using the exact same cast, story lines and settings. Babylon 5, The Movie Collection is the result of this logic chain. You get not one but two pre flicks, one mid flick and two post flicks. What you don’t get is a rule book about how to watch these things because if you watch the post flicks before watching the show too much is given away but if you watch the show before watching the post flicks you’re already getting much of the info. Sometimes you are even too incomprehensible for us.

Greenings

Greenings Earthers! We have interrupted this communication and feel honored to particulate. We are not sure of the significance of this blogging though. We searched the dvds and it did not seem to help. We did find some worthy video of Sean Connery scowling however and enjoyed it greatly. We remember our first time with facial expressions. As a side report, Klaarg, our navigator, wanted to speak of a different first time but you would not like the details of what is an interesting but internally queasy process. Why are we here? Indeed, it was the wide diversity of your electronic flailings that first drew our attention to your backwards arm of the galactic spiral. It continues to draw us. You seem to be seriously confused. We struggled to discern the meaning behind the many of your messages. What is this F-Troop? And is it symbolic or an indication of a repressed past? What of this A-Team? You seem to have many teams. Surely this one is not the best. Who was Erica and did her work at a hospital for Generals mean your society was militaristically inclined? We were dismayed that the first three dozen or so Earthers we probed for information retained memories of numerous contacts with Galactic entities. We again were moved to study your dvd records and were stunned. After reviewing multiple tenstacles full of these records which chronicled your various encounters with non-human species it became clear to us that your multiple dysfunctions may simply be are due to your frequent contact with what we consider to be the lower form of superior beings. In any case, we have much more to share with you but the blog tools are waving to us and making Altair eyes which we interpret to mean we must end.

(The Damn Aliens can be found here weekly or whenever they get around to it)

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!