Aucbvax.1642 fa.sf-lovers utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!JPM@MIT-AI Fri Jun 12 05:31:29 1981 SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #148 SF-LOVERS AM Digest Friday, 12 Jun 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 148 Today's Topics: SF Movies - Capsule Movie Reviews & Raiders of the Lost Ark, SF Books - Fantasticats, SF Topics - Science in Science Fiction & Children's TV (Dodo the Kid from Outer Space and Beanie's Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Jun 1981 2133-PDT From: Jim McGrath Subject: Capsule Movie Reviews By Chicago Sun-Times Reviews (c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service) ''Clash of the Titans''-Laurence Olivier plays Zeus in this spectacular fantasy. Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom, Ursula Andress and Susan Fleetwood also star. Rated PG. ''Outland''-''High Noon'' on the moon, this uncompromising science-fiction thriller stars Sean Connery, Peter Boyle and Frances Sternhagen. Rated PG. 3 stars. ''Raiders of the Lost Ark''-Harrison Ford stars as an adventurer looking for the Ark of the Covenant in this new George Lucas production, directed by Steven Spielberg. Rated PG. ''Screamers''-Science-fiction thriller about a mad scientist on a remote island. Barbara Bach, Joseph Cotten and Mel Ferrer star. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 1158-PDT From: ICL.REDFORD at SU-SCORE Subject: RotLA, another view We had a sneak preview of Raiders of the Lost Ark here a little while ago. As others have said, it's non-stop slam-bang action. I think I empathized too much with the villains, though. In one scene a baddie is pounding the hell out of Indiana Jones, the hero, when he gets caught in an airplane propeller and chopped to bits. We're meant to take a gruesome delight in his destruction, but I felt nauseated. Five minutes before this guy was just moseying along and now his brains are all over the pavement. In "Star Wars" you had (literally) faceless enemies, and it didn't matter so much. They were just robot dolls to knock down. Here they scream when killed. It's getting tough, I know, to find sufficiently unsympathetic bad guys. Nazis are about as close as you can get in modern times. You can't even use yelling savages anymore; in an early part of the movie they make it clear that the yelling savages pursuing our hero have been duped by the fiendish French archaeologist. Even Nazis, though, have wrinkles and bald spots, and most of them are just doing their job. If they become more than just tenpins to be knocked out of our hero's way, then you start to feel it when they get run over by trucks or pushed off cliffs. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 2138-PDT From: Jim McGrath Subject: Raiders of the Lost Ark [ The following review of Raiders of the Lost Ark is not quite a spoiler, although it is comprehensive. Note that this movie opens today throughout the nation. -- Jim ] By VINCENT CANBY c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK - From the first moments, when the star-circled mountain in the Paramount Pictures logo fades into a similarly shaped, fog-shrouded Andean peak, where who knows what awful things are about to happen, ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' is off and running at a breakneck pace that simply won't stop until the final shot, an ironic epilogue that recalls nothing less than ''Citizen Kane.'' That, however, is the only high-toned reference in a movie that otherwise devotes itself exclusively to the glorious days of the B-picture. To get to the point immediately, ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' is one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made. It is an homage to old-time movie serials and back-lot cheapies that transcends its inspirations to become, in effect, the movie we saw in our imaginations as we watched, say, Buster Crabbe in ''Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars'' or in Sam Katzman's ''Jungle Jim'' movies. The film is the result of the particularly happy collaboration between Steven Spielberg, its director, and George Lucas, who is one of its executive producers and who, with Philip Kaufman, wrote the original story on which Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay is based. As Lucas's ''Star Wars'' helped itself to all sorts of myths, folk tales and characters from children's fiction and fused them into a work of high originality, and as Spielberg's ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' made sweetly benign a kind of science-fiction film that had turned paranoid, ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' refines its tacky source materials into a movie that evokes memories of movie-going of an earlier era but that possesses its own, far more rare sensibility. The film is about Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), a two-fisted professor of archaeology with a knack for landing in tight situations in some of the earth's more exotic corners, and his sometimes girlfriend Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the daughter of a world-famous archeologist and who, when we first meet her, is running a lowdown bar in remotest Nepal. Just how Marion has come to be running a gin mill in Nepal is never explained, but ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' is great fun as much for the things it explains as for the explanations it withholds. The time is 1936, which not only attaches ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' to the films it remembers but also makes possible its fondly lunatic plot, which is about the attempts of Indiana Jones and Marion, at the behest of the United States government, to find the lost Ark of the Covenant before a team of Nazi archeologists can lay their hands on it. Hitler, who is described as being obsessed with the occult, is hellbent on finding the Ark, which once contained the Ten Commandments as handed down to Moses on their originally inscribed tablets. The Ark is reported variously (1) to confer magical powers on the person who possesses it, (2) to be ''something that man was not meant to disturb,'' being ''not of this world'' and, more picturesquely, (3) as ''a radio for speaking to God.'' No wonder Indiana and Marion risk life and limb to prevent the Ark from finding its way to Berlin! After their initial reconciliation in Nepal, following Indiana's narrow escape from death in the Andes, Indiana and Marion fly on to Egypt where there is every reason to believe the Nazis are about to uncover the Ark in a long-buried temple called the Well of Souls. Even before they reach the actual dig, however, there are fearsome obstacles to be overcome in Cairo, including attempted assassinations, a successful kidnapping and a fate worse than death for Marion at the hands of a renegade French archaeologist named Belloq (Paul Freeman). More of the plot you should not know, though it gives nothing away to reveal that Indiana and Marion, either singly or together, must face such tests of their endurance as confinement in an ancient tomb with thousands of asps and cobras, an attack by poisoned darts, a plate of poisoned dates, torture with a red-hot poker, being tied up in a vehicle that explodes before our very eyes and a superchase in which Indiana, on horseback, attempts to catch a Nazi truck convoy carrying the newly found lost Ark to Cairo for transshipment to Berlin. The film's climax is almost as dazzling a display as the one that brings ''Close Encounters'' to its climax. Harrison and Miss Allen are an endearingly resilient, resourceful couple, he with his square jaw, his eyes that can apparently see out of the back of his head and his ever-present fedora, and she with her Brooke Adams-Margot Kidder beauty, her ability to outdrink, shot glass for shot glass, Nepal's toughest barflies, her ever-ready sarcasm and her ability to screech without losing her poise. Spielberg has also managed to make a movie that looks like a billion dollars (it was filmed in, among other places, Tunisia, France, England and Hawaii) yet still suggests the sort of production shortcuts we associate with old B-movies. The Cairo we see on the screen is obviously a North African city but, also obviously, it's not Cairo. There's not a pyramid in sight. My one quibble with Spielberg is that he didn't insert a familiar, preferably unmatching stock shot of Cairo into the scene to make sure we got the point. I suppose, we can't have everything. ''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' which has been rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''), includes virtually nonstop action that involves a lot of violence, but this is less horrifying than scary in a most pleasurable way. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 11:21:41-PDT From: CSVAX.wildbill at Berkeley Subject: cats The Flat Cats are indeed Heinlein, and appear in his novel \\The Rolling Stones//, which is about a couple of brother child geniuses living in Luna who earn enough credits to buy a spaceship (!!!), with the avowed intention of becoming interplanetary merchants. Their parents (grandmother is Hazel Stone, first mentioned in Future History stories as the chief of Baker Street Irregulars in \\The Moon is a Harsh Mistress//) decide this is not a good idea, so get talked into underwriting the whole venture and coming along themselves in exploration of outer Solar System. Flat cats are not properly cats, but literary ancestors of Tribbles. Feed a flat cat and you get more flat cats. Starve a flat cat and keep it at about 50 degrees Kelvin (their normal environment is vacuum) and it estivates or something...but who would want to starve such a harmless, friendly beast? Answer: a family in a spaceship with a finite food supply and an exponentially growing flat cat supply. [ Thanks also to Will Martin (WMARTIN at OFFICE-3) for identifying the flat cats. -- Jim ] As for cat-tails, they are not inhabitants of the Ringworld, but instead of Earth Plus 6 Million (the one that goes around Jupiter) in Niven's \\A World Out of Time//. They were cats which had been genetically engineered to have no legs and 3-foot-long tails. [ Thanks also to Ken Haase for identifying the cat-tails as belonging to \\A World Out of Time//. -- Jim ] ------------------------------ From: MJL@MIT-MC Date: 06/11/81 12:49:29 Cats? How about the mutant Cat-People of PJ Farmer's THE STONE GOD AWAKENS? (Won't say anything about the story, it'd be a spoiler...) /Mijjil ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 09:50:51-PDT From: E.jeffc at Berkeley Subject: No science in science fiction ? I ended the last letter be stating that the science fiction of H.G. Wells encouraged anti-scientific thought. Once you think about the plots of his books, it becomes rather obvious. The Time Machine: the evil Morlocks have all the technology, and it's very obvious as to whom the reader's sympathies are to belong to. It was science which destroyed the world in the first place, and it was science which was holding the beautiful Eloy prisoners of the evil Morlocks. The War of the Worlds: Again, the evil Martians have all the technology on their side. After destroying the world and making man captive, the Martians are defeated by bacteria, NOT BY MAN. Nothing man could do would get rid of them, man had no control whatsoever. It was only by the unforseeable intervention of disease which freed man. It is a common theme throughout Well's books that technology causes some disaster, and then the world is set straight again at the end when all science is put into the control of a few select people, who could insure that science will not be "misused" again and therefore cause another disaster. In short, Wells had the mentality of an environmentallist, not a scientist! And yet his books are considered science fiction classics!!! -------------------- If science fiction in its written form has some problems, these are nothing when compared to the film media. Here I will attack two very popular science fiction films: Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Isaac Asmiov is well known for having declared in his editorials that there is no science in this movie. That is absolutely correct, but the real danger of this film is even more ghastly. Consider what the main characters go through in the film. They constantly hear the musical notes, they have an obsession with this mountain, so strong an obsession, in fact, that one man builds a model of the mountain in his living room! In the process, he drives his wife away. Any psychologist can tell you that these are the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, and yet the movie presents these things as necessary for the obtainment of the "higher truth"!!!!! This movie doesn't make science popular with the public, nor does it give the public an idea what science is, but it does tell the public that it's OK to have nervous breakdown, because this is the way to find the higher truth in the universe. Star Wars: Here I add my few hundred bytes to the few hundred thousand already said. (Pay attention, George Lucas, if you are reading this.) On the whole, Star Wars is a simple action film, filled with the typical SF gadgetry. In this fashion it is no worse than the written form. However, there is the question of the Force. I cannot think of anything more anti-scientific than the Force. It follows no rules that can be discerned, it can do anything, and there is an obvious connection between the Force, ESP, and mysticism in general. -------------------- Science fact television shows also are guilt of this gross distortion of science, and I will continue with that story in another letter tomorrow. Jeff ------------------------------ Date: 11 June 1981 19:12 edt From: Margolin.PDO at MIT-Multics Subject: Dodo Yes, I remember "Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space". I don't remember very much, and I'm surprised that Lauren has never heard of it. The most I remember is the beginning of the theme song: Dodo, the kid from outer space, Dodo, he can go anyplace, With antennas on his ears, Propellers on his feet, . . . That's as far as my memory goes. While this is playing, he is zipping all over the place. Much of the theme of the show was him trying to get accustomed to earthly customs (much as in "Mork and Mindy"), while not getting caught by the authorities. barmar ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 1713-PDT From: Lynn Gold Subject: Beany and Cecil Funny...according to Stan Freberg (who created the series), it was just a children's puppet show back in the '40's which later became an animated feature. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Freberg, he has released many comedy albums and produced numerous commercials, such as Sunsweet's "campaign" to remove wrinkles from prunes and more recently a bunch for Jeno's Pizzas and a Campbell Soup commercial which had Ann Miller tap dancing on a can of soup.) While I'm on the topic of commercials, does anyone out there know the name of the girl who appeared in the Choo-Choo Charlie commercials for Good-n-Plenty? --Lynn ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest *********************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.