Ah, the 1800s were a simpler time. Before that whole Civil War mess, America was in the throes of the Second Great Awakening, with the Northeast so thoroughly scorched by religious fervor that a swath of New York was dubbed “the Burned-over district.”
Amidst this, Spiritualism was all the rage, too, so it didn’t initially attract much notice when John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”
Those who already knew anything of the man might have figured he had simply snapped. Spear’s outspoken views on abolition and women’s rights, among other topics, led a number of churches to drive him out, and, in 1844, after a particularly vigorous denunciation of slavery, he was beaten and left for dead in Maine.
A picture of Spear, and the title page of a tome of the Electricizers’ revelations.
He recovered, and, in 1851, with the Electricizers’ plans dancing in his head, quit the ministry. Two years later, he began his work on the machine, with a result stranger than fiction.
In light of the charming Goodnight Dune children’s book that’s making the rounds online right now, today seems like a great time to share some treasures from my personal stash of weird, random, off-color, No-Seriously-WTF-Were-They-Thinking movie franchise ephemera.
These, for your delectation, are scans and photos of various pages from the astoundingly age-inappropriate Dune activity book series, published in 1984 to promote David Lynch’s movie adaptation of the classic Frank Herbert novel, produced by Universal Studios.
You know, FOR KIDS:
Yes, that’s a coloring page of Dr. Yueh preparing to assassinate Duke Leto with a dartgun. And up at the top there, that’s a floppy, diseased sex organ-reminiscent Guild Navigator, presented a-la la la “Connect the Dots”.
And here’s another cheerful coloring page of the fresh corpses of Duke Leto and Piter:
Heeeeee! Who the frak was in charge of marketing? More to the point, what kind of Melange were they smokin’ during the merch meeting, when it was decided that producing this series of vengeful activity books for a K-through-8 demographic made good business sense?
Well, whoever they were, Coilhouse salutes them.
Explore the childlike wonderment murder, intrigue, suppurating boils, phallic symbolism and knifeplay after the jump.
I’m not sure how Hulu works in countries outside the US at this point. My apologies if you cannot watch this, it’s one of the reasons I try to avoid sites like Hulu.
It’s Friday, people, which means that there’s only a few more hours until you can stick a fork in another soul-crushing work week. Allow the FAM to help that time pass a little more quickly with this week’s presentation of Don Bluth’s 1982 classic The Secret of NIMH, starring, among others, Mary Elizabeth Hartman (in her last role before her suspected suicide), John Carradine, Dom DeLuise, Aldo Ray, and Wil Wheaton.
An adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the movie tells the story of Mrs. Brisby, a widowed field mouse, whose son falls ill with pneumonia and cannot leave the house for three weeks. At this time, Spring plowing is set to begin on the farm the Brisbys live on and Mrs. Brisby, knowing she cannot stay where she is, visits the Great Owl who directs her to a group of mysterious rats who live in a rose bush and are led by a wizened old rat named Nicodemus. Brisby learns that the rats, along with her late husband Jonathan, were part of an experiment performed at the National Institute of Mental Health which boosted their intelligence to human levels at which point they made their escape.
The Secret of NIMH was a favorite of mine as a child and recent viewings have done little to dampen my enthusiasm for it. Bluth and his partners, most of who had defected from Disney with him, were fixated on what they perceived to be the decline of animation as an art form. The Secret of NIMH, then, was a collection of expensive and, even at the time, outdated animation techniques. The glowing eyes of Nicodemus, for example, were created by back-lighting colored gels. Characters had different color palettes for individual lighting situations (Mrs. Brisby alone had 46). It’s a veritable showcase of animation and it all makes for a beautiful film. Still, it came at a price, and the film came in so over the original budget that Bluth and his co-producers had to collectively mortgage their homes to finance some of it. There was even a problem with their diminutive protagonist’s name:
During the film’s production, Aurora contacted Wham-O, the manufacturers of Frisbee flying discs, with concerns about possible trademark infringements if the “Mrs. Frisby” name in O’Brien’s original book was used in the movie. Wham-O rejected Aurora’s request for waiver to use the same-sounding name to their “Frisbee”, in the movie. Aurora informed Bluth & company that Mrs. Frisby’s name would have to be altered. By then, the voice work had already been recorded for the film, so the name change to “Mrs. Brisby” necessitated a combination of re-recording some lines and, because John Carradine was unavailable for further recordings, careful sound editing had to be performed, taking the “B” sound of another word from Carradine’s recorded lines, and replace the “F” sound with the “B” sound, altering the name from “Frisby” to “Brisby”.
In the end, there are really two things that make NIMH stick out: its tone and its protagonist. The mood of the film is exceedingly foreboding, especially for a G-rated feature intended for children, without crossing into the historical seriousness of, say, Grave of the Fireflies or the political allegory of Watership Down. When I think of it, the images that come to my mind are bleak, eerie, and filled with fire. Likewise, its heroine is unlike anything one would have seen from Disney. Mrs. Brisby is no princess. She is a middle-aged mother and widow. Her quest is not an epic struggle between good and evil, it is to save her family. She doesn’t fall in love with a dashing male lead, she is not even looking for it, the love she had for another is in her past, before we are even introduced to her. Is she one of the great feminist characters in film? No. But she is a refreshing change from the typical Barbie doll pap most peddle.
Watching The Secret of NIMH it is perhaps most evident that it is a labor of love, both for its story and for the medium it is presented in. It is not a stretch to say that they don’t make them like this anymore. After all, who would be crazy enough to try?
From Nicholas Gurewitch, cialis sale creator of The Perry Bible Fellowship comes Trails of Tarnation, recounting the travels and travails of Jeff and Derek. In this inaugural episode, entitled “Black Coffee”, Derek instructs Jeff on the proper way to brew that most holy of morning beverages with unintended consequences.
It wasn’t even the deliveryman’s use of profanity that bothered Joanne. No, she had endured plenty of course language in her time (and used a fair bit herself for that matter). What really irked her was his indifference to her protests over the state of the package he asked her to sign for. Indifference was, perhaps, a misnomer. So smug was his bearing that Joanne had no doubts that the man had interpreted the “Fragile” stickers that festooned the box as “Kick Me” signs. She was sure he had done this on purpose and when he spat “Go ahead, call the goddamn office if it makes you feel better,” in response to her indignant threat it only made that conviction stronger. This miserable little man, unshaven and reeking of cigarettes, obviously got his kicks by torturing customers. No doubt he was a member of some awful labor union, and felt safe in the knowledge that this offense was just another in a long line of similar incidents that would go unpunished. This time would be different, however. His employer may have been rendered impotent by socialists but Joanne had no such impediment. This man was about to learn that no one fucks with the Pink Armadillo and walks away unscathed.
Like Edgar Allan Poe, the FAM returns after a week’s absence, delirious and with no memory of its whereabouts. Who knows what trouble it got up to? Regardless of whether or not the FAM spent last week in a meth-fueled haze, the fact of the matter is that it is back, looking to put the deaths of all those Shriners behind it. So let us get to today’s films instead of dwelling on the fact that those tiny cars are not street legal and one cannot be blamed for driving through a parade if the route is not clearly marked.
Today it’s two short films by David O’Reilly: 2009’s Please Say Something and his most recent External World. Both feature his off-beat direction combined with a dark sense of humor. External World takes a page from Robot Chicken with stories told in bite-sized morsels stitched together with a thin, overarching tale while Please Say Something follows a cat and her mouse husband through their dysfunctional relationship. O’Reilly and his team do a spectacular job, using a bare minimum of detail to convey each scene. The characters are equally simple though they still manage to display a wide range of emotions. They are wonderful and delightfully weird, though your tolerance for acerbic wit will determine how well you take to them.
What better day than Thursday for some marionette flavored nightmare fuel? Behold the mad weirdness of Patrick Sims and Les Antliaclastes’ Hilum. I’m at a loss to properly describe this one, but fortunately the London International Mime Festival website described it thus:
A micro comic-tragedy based on the cycles of the washing machine and set in the basement of a rundown museum of natural history. Orphaned and cut off from the ordered kingdom of curiosities upstairs, the cast of nursery rhyme characters, cartoon images, and mischievous urchins turn playtime into a theatre of cruelty. Whites mix with colours, delicates get hot washed, and a monstrous big toe devours holes in the socks.
So there is that. I’m not sure if that is really very helpful at all. Two minutes, really, is all you need to decide if this is up your alley or not.
Linda Behar constructs intricate, photo-realistic landscapes, mostly marshes so far, with a needle and thread. It’s hard to believe that the image above is not a photograph or a painting, but embroidery, something that strikes me as akin to constructing a quarter scale replica of the Eiffel Tower out of bellybutton lint — a task I would reserve for only the most eccentric shut-in or obsessive compulsive, neither of which Mrs. Behar appears to be. Her work, which can be seen on her Flickr page, is simply astounding and she achieves this visual fidelity by printing photos onto cloth and then going about her meticulous business.
It’s Friday, dear readers, which means that it’s time for a dose of whatever I can find on YouTube. Today the FAM invites you to get your nerd on, because today we are showing “Chain of Command,” or episodes 10 and 11 of the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, recognized far and wide as the best Star Trek. Don’t you argue with me. Broadcast on WPIX New York beginning with its first episode until at least 7 or 8 years after its run ended, it still, to me, represents some of the finest sci-fi ever shown on television, and “Chain of Command” (more specifically the Part 2) is an especially outstanding episode.
Indeed, the first half of “Chain of Command” gives no indication that it will stray very far from the structures and motifs of that standard episode. It may seem strange at first to have Patrick Stewart’s Jean Luc Picard play commando and stranger still to see another captain on the bridge of the Enterprise but the writers do not stray too far out of the show’s comfort zone.
With the capture of Picard at the end of the first part, things take a decidedly darker turn. The second part of “Chain of Command” quickly becomes one of the more sinister chapters in the series as we are shown the interrogation of Picard by the Cardassian Gul Madred. Madred is played by David Warner, who shows, as he did in Time Bandits, that he absolutely relishes being the villain.
It also happens to be (both at the time and now) one of the more accurate portrayals of torture shown on television. Perhaps best known for it’s “How many lights are there?” homage to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the images of Picard stripped naked and hoisted into a stress position are perhaps more unsettling since the coinage of “enhanced interrogation techniques”. As Slate’s Juliet Lapidos noted while discussing J.J. Abrams’ Apple store inspired reboot, even the Cardassian’s reasoning for keeping the Enterprise captain seems prescient:
When Picard’s comrades on the Enterprise learn of Picard’s capture, they insist that the Cardassians abide by the terms of a Geneva-like “Solanis Convention.” The Cardassians rebuff the request: “The Solanis Convention applies to prisoners of war … [Picard] will be treated as a terrorist.”
All of this is wrapped up in the typical Star Trek cheesiness, which you either find wretched or endearing. I long ago trained myself to overlook these things. Watching Warner and Stewart go at it here is a treat and they do wonders with dialogue littered with references to alien delicacies and imaginary planets. The other half of the plot, aboard the Enterprise, is fairly standard and may not appeal to those who aren’t fans of the show. To be honest, I think I would have preferred the entirety of the story taking place in that room, excising any of the events taking place elsewhere until Warner was informed of his prisoner’s release, though two hours of that may have been expecting too much of its audience. Nevertheless it remains one of my favorite episodes from (I reiterate) the best Star Trek.
And that’s going to do it for this week’s Friday Afternoon Movie. We shall see you next week. You may now return to your normal levels of nerdery.
Sometimes there is no good reason for doing something other than because one can. Also, prostate because it will produce some incredibly awesome results, as evidenced by the video above. Take a look at what happens when, at an archery range in Korea, someone decides to strap a rear-facing camera to an arrow and send it hurtling 145 meters down range.
