Pixel Scroll 10/3/21 Roll-Your-Own

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I’m off to have a health thing taken care of. Have filled in a few people about what’s up in case they need to know later. Meanwhile, post in comments here whatever you think should have been in today’s Scroll!

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44 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/3/21 Roll-Your-Own”

  1. Here’s your Birthdays for today along with a Wish for Mike to get well soon.

    Madlyn Rhue, 1935 – 2003

    She was in “Space Seed” as Lt. Marla McGivers, Khan Noonien Singh’s (Ricardo Montalbán) love interest. Other genre appearances included being on the original Fantasy Island as Lillie Langtry in “Legends”, and Maria in the “Firefall” episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

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    Pamela Hensley, born 1950, aged seventy one years

    Actor who played Princess Ardala in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century movie and TV series, starred in the original Rollerball movie, and had guest roles in several episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man.

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    Charles Middleton, 1874 – 1949

    He is no doubt best remembered for his role as the Emperor Ming the Merciless in the three Flash Gordon serials made between 1936 and 1940 which is only genre production he appeared in save three chapters of a Forties Batman serial in which he played Ken Colton.

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    Lena Headey, born 1973, aged forty eight years

    Many of you will know her as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones but I liked her sociopathic Madeline “Ma-Ma” Madrigal on the most awesome Dredd much better. She was also Angelika in The Brothers Grimm, a film I’m sure I’ve seen but remember nothing about even though Heath Ledger was in it.

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    Katherine Kerr, born 1944, aged seventy seven years

    Best known for her series of Celtic-influenced fantasy novels set in Deverry. Now concluded, it ran fifteen novels long. The Polar City sequence of Polar City Blues and Polar City Nightmare with Kate Daniel is quite excellent.

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    Ray Nelson, born 1931, aged ninety years

    Writer who is most known for his 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” which was used by John Carpenter as the basis for his 1988 film They Live. He also co-authored with Philip K. Dick, The Ganymede Takeover. Blake’s Progress in which the poet William Blake is a time traveler is claimed by Clute to be his best work.

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    Douglas A. Van Belle, born 1965, aged fifty six years

    And I find yet another Award I hadn’t heard of. He won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent given out by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) and the National Science Fiction convention. Interestingly he go on to be nominated another nine times without a win for this Award after winning with his first nomination.

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    Dennis Villeneuve, born 1967, aged fifty four years

    Producer / Director and writer of the present two Dune films (yes I’m assuming the second will get done), plus the Dune: The Sisterhood series being done for HBO Max. He’s also the Director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049.

  2. Twenty one years ago this evening ago on FOX, the Dark Angel series first aired. It was created by James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee who were also the Executive Producers for the series. It was Cameron’s first television series. (Eighteen years later, he’d be the Executive Producer of James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. Anyone see it?)

    It was the first major role for Jessica Alba. The other major cast member was Michael Weatherly. Despite ecstatic reception from critics, it didn’t do at all well in the ratings after the first season and was cancelled during the second season giving it a total of forty three episodes. It currently has a ninety four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.

  3. Another media anniversary — on this day in 1964, the Saturday morning cartoon Underdog premiered on NBC. The title character was voiced by Wally Cox. And in 1966, Harold Hecuba (played by Phil Silvers) visits Gilligan’s Island, and the castaways put on a musical version of Hamlet.

  6. I’m ambivalent about this Cars 4 voice session piece. It made me laugh but I felt a little dirty doing it. I’m including it for completeness sake:

    And as is traditional, the Cut for Time sketch is very funny:

  7. @bill: And I still remember the songs from that Hamlet production.

    OGH: All the best for a quick and easy resolution to the health thing.

  8. Indeed, best wishes to OGH!

    I remember Dark Angel – I think the first season, which concentrated more on daily life in post-economic-collapse America, was rather better than the second, which was more of a generic action show. It was one of two shows (the other being The 4400) which demonstrated what seems to be an important truth – if your season finale involves Seattle being taken over by a post-human/mutant/alien abductee collective, you’re not going to get the show renewed.

  9. Capricon has moved to the Sheraton Grand hotel in downtown Chicago, and Capricon 42 will be held February 3-6, 2022.

  10. NYT BOOK REVIEW VS SCIENCE FICTION — As science fiction tropes infiltrate mainstream fiction, the New York Times Book Review steadfastly refuses to admit the genre’s influence and importance outside of the occasional specialty column. For example, even though Richard Powers’ Bewilderment shows its genre influences on its metaphorical sleeve, Tracy K. Smith seems to deliberately skip over the connection:

    Some of us will immediately think of Daniel Keyes’s 1966 novel “Flowers for Algernon,” which also happens to be the audiobook Theo and Robin listen to on a road trip from Wisconsin down to a camping spot in the Smoky Mountains. And so the joy of watching Robin triumph is tempered by the knowledge of just how far south such an enterprise might descend.

  15. Ray Nelson is also credited with bringing the propellor beanie into Science Fiction Fandom (when he was a teenage fan in Michigan).

  18. What SHOULD have been in the scroll? Hmmm…
    (1) After a moving corporate screening of Bambi, the Disney corporation has vowed to split off into smaller companies and channel more profits to authors.
    “We discovered through the heart-warming story of survival and friendship,” said the Disney CEO, “that we really have gobbled up to much intellectual property without properly rewarding creators.”
    (2) The virtual World Town Planning conference is dedicating two of the five days of activities to ensuring that more urban centres are dominated by book shops and libraries. “They’re just kind of cool, you know?” said one participant.
    Proposals also include replacing highways with an innovative tram/comic-shop hybrid public transportation system.
    (3) Epidemiologists have discovered a cure for a wide range of novel viruses that hopefully will limit the spread of future pandemics. “A stringent course of speculative fiction has been shown to have a high prophylactic effect on infection, just so long as you regularly shift subgenres”. Doctors advise no more than two works of epic fantasy per week to ensure a sufficient variety of reading.
    (4) The Republican Party has announced its new platform. Having sought out the most regressive legislation they could, they have finally decided to ditch all their old policies and campaign for a national policy of “just great big dinosaurs everywhere”. Fox News has endorsed the plan saying “this is a huge step forward in taking America back to the way the founding fathers imagined it: a verdant prehistoric paradise populated by reptilian megafauna”.
    (5) Not to be outdone, the Democratic Party has announced a policy of “Giant puppydogs EVERYWHERE!” in a collaboration with a range of tech billionaires who will now invest all their time and money into creating colossal (but friendly) dogs, large enough to bestride mountains.

  25. I can report that MileHiCon has nonvirtually concluded, a good time was had by me, and everyone I saw appeared gruntled. Best wishes to OGH.

  29. Headey also played the title role in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which really deserved more seasons.

    I think more Deverry is not out of the question.

  34. Hope all goes smoothly, Mike.

    I saw this a few days ago, though it came out in May, apparently. “This ain’t Build-a-B****” by Bella Poarch. The music video has definite genre elements.

  35. DUNE SOUNDTRACK GOES FOR BROKE: As Dennis Villenueve’s Dune movie arrives close to the end of October, Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack will stretch across three albums:

    –The Dune Sketchbook (Music from the Soundtrack): Extended explorations of the score, presumably in preparation for the final version of the soundtrack. You can purchase this album in Standard or Dolby Atmos Music formats. It was released on September 3.

    –Dune (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). It is available in Standard and Dolby Atmos.

    –The Art and Soul of Dune soundtrack: The companion soundtrack to the book of the same title. The book and the recording will be available on October 22.

  36. Best wishes to OGH!

    And, while more bookshops improve any landscape, there also need to be more places to get a good – not decent, not tolerable – cup of tea.

  40. More birthdays for October 3rd: John Boyd, 10/3/19; Donald R. Bensen, 10/3/27; Bruce Henstell, 10/3/45.

    I’ve been going through some rather startling, frightening and upsetting medical things myself the last month or so, Mike, and I hope your problems are resolved!

  42. I just watched the most recent episode of the BBC quiz show Only Connect on BBC 2 – a quiz show where contestants have to find connections between clues, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell – and one of the combinations this time featured the combination in this screenshot, picked out and connected together from amongst a jumble of 16 clues on the ‘wall’:

    [ Hugo ] [ Darwin ] [ Webby ] [ Tony ]

    … which are linked together by all being .. Awards!

  43. Also, have you noticed that the new Disney animated movie Encanto has a surface resemblance to Piers Anthony’s A Spell fir Chameleon ? That makes me shiver.

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