(1) GET READY FOR VALENTINE’S DAY. Cora Buhlert rolls out “Love Through Space and Time 2022 – A Round-up of Indie Valentine’s Day Speculative Fiction”.
…These Valentine’s Day stories cover the broad spectrum of speculative fiction. We have urban fantasy, a lot of paranormal romance, paranormal mysteries, science fiction mysteries, science fiction romance, space opera, space colonisation, horror, alternate history, time travel, dragons, werewolves, wizards, ghosts, demons, aliens, robots, magical greeting card writers, crime-fighting witches, crime-fighting ghosts, Viking ghosts, dinners with demons, grumpy cupids, love potions, Valentine’s Day in space and much more. But one thing unites all of those very different books. They’re all set on or around Valentine’s Day….
(2) EVEN BEFORE COVID. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Fans who had to deal with Covid restrictions coming to DisCon III should be interested in June Moffatt’s account of the preparations she and her husband Len Moffatt had to do before travelling to the UK and Germany as 1973 TAFF delegates, as recounted in their report The Moffatt House Abroad.
Then there was the matter of shots for overseas travel. We thought of smallpox vaccinations immediately, but our doctor said they were hardly necessary where we were going, and said we’d do better with protection against cholera and typhoid, which we might be exposed to in crowded international air terminals.
It was a remarkably warm winter and it seemed as if we took turns having colds, so we never did get to the doctor for the necessary shots…The Friday before we were supposed to leave, I was driving home and listening to the radio when I heard a bit of news that startled me considerably. There had been an outbreak of smallpox in London. Only three known cases so far, but the authorities were watching carefully.(It seems that a lab worker had been working with smallpox virus without having been immunized. When she got sick, she was hospitalized in a regular ward, while her doctor worked to find out what she had. Two people visiting the person sitting on the bed next to hers had caught it from her. They subsequently died. She recovered.)
The next day we were at our doctor’s office, sans appointment. When we explained the problem, he subsequently immunized us and had a few remarks to make on people who disapprove of smallpox vaccinations. (The remarks were not particularly complementary, in case you were wondering.) He gave us our yellow health certificates and advised us to get them stamped by a local health department, which we did on Monday.
Copies of the Moffatts’ trip report may still be available as advertised last November on the Unofficial Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund site.
(3) PAINT GETS THEM HIGH. Dreams of Space revisits “Books and Ephemera: Danny Dunn and the Anti-gravity Paint (1956)”. See the cover and interior art at the link.
Danny Dunn and the Anti-gravity Paint was a 1956 fictional book. Part of a 15 book series about Danny Dunn written by by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. In 1967 they reprinted “…and the Anti-Gravity Paint.” It had a new painted cover making it seem modern to young space-age children. Danny Dunn books were loosely science-based so the problems were solved with scientific ideas. I thought the 1956 space race setting of the book connects it with others of the time like Rocket Ship Galileo.
(4) BERYL VERTUE (1931-2022). Beryl Vertue, a writers’ agent who became a television producer with credits including Sherlock, has died at the age of 90. The Guardian noted some of her achievements.
Beryl Vertue, who has died aged 90, played an important role in the history of British television comedy. She began as an agent for writers such as Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, as well as the performers Tony Hancock and Frankie Howerd, before pioneering the sale of hit UK TV formats to American television.
The Moffat-Vertues partnership had further success with two drama series transposing Victorian literary figures to the present day. Jekyll (2007) starred James Nesbitt as Robert Louis Stevenson’s doctor with a split personality, while Sherlock (2010-17) was an irreverent take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, co-created by Moffat and Mark Gatiss, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr Watson. Cumberbatch dubbed Vertue “Sherlock’s godmother”.
From typing scripts for The Goon Show (1951-60) and other radio and TV sitcoms, Vertue became the company’s business manager – later managing director – and negotiated deals with broadcasters. This made her an agent for some of the most respected writers in the country, who also included Barry Took, Dick Vosburgh, Marty Feldman, John Junkin and Johnny Speight.
Outside comedy circles, Vertue sealed a deal for Terry Nation that gave him partial copyright on the Daleks when he introduced them in Doctor Who’s second story shortly after the sci-fi series began in 1963.
She also blazed a trail by persuading the BBC to venture into programme-related merchandise, resulting in Daleks memorabilia, a Hancock’s Half Hour board game and Steptoe and Son jigsaws.
Alongside film production, Vertue negotiated the sale of British sitcom remake rights to American and European channels. In the US, Till Death Us Do Part became All in the Family (1971-79) and Steptoe and Son was retitled Sanford and Son (1972-77).
She was also executive producer of Tommy (1975), the film of the Who’s rock opera…
Vertue was made an OBE in 2000 and a CBE in 2016, and presented with the Royal Television Society’s lifetime achievement award in 2012.
(5) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1972 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Fifty years ago today, Cabaret premiered as directed by Bob Fosse and produced by Cy Feuer. It would be Fosse’s first film success, after Sweet Charity, his first film, failed badly.
Set in Berlin in obviously a cabaret during the Weimar Republic, the film is based on the 1966 Broadway Cabaret musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, which was adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories novel and the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten adapted from that work.
It had a stellar cast of Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson. Fritz Wepper and Joel Grey. The film would bring Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, her own first chance to sing on screen, and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
It goes without saying that the critics loved it with Roger Ebert being effusive when he said in his later critical review of it that “Instead of cheapening the movie version by lightening its load of despair, director Bob Fosse has gone right to the bleak heart of the material and stayed there well enough to win an Academy Award for Best Director.” And Emanuel Levy on his review website says that “After a decade of stagnant musicals, Fosse reenergized the genre with a dazzling, socially conscious musical, which was more reflective of the 1970s zeitgeist than the Nazi era. Liza Minnelli is brilliant in what’s the best role of her career.”
Box office wise, it did fantastic earning forty-three million against just five million in production costs. It was a Good Thing that it did considering that Sweet Charity, his first film based off the musical by him of the same name had lost twelve million dollars after costing only eight million to produce. Though even that disputed with the Studio saying it only made four million.
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give a seventy two percent rating. Cabaret is available for watching on HBO Max. Pretty much every other service has it for rent.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born February 13, 1908 — Patrick Barr. He appeared in Doctor Who as Hobson in the Second Doctor story, “The Moonbase”, in the Seventies Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) “You Can Always Find a Fall Guy” episode and appeared once in The Avengers as Stonehouse in the “Take me to Your Leader” episode. His last genre role was as the British Ambassador in Octopussy. (Died 1985.)
- Born February 13, 1932 — Susan Oliver. She shows up in the original Trek pilot, “The Cage” as Vina, the Orion slave girl. She had a number of one-offs in genre television including Wild Wild West, Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Tarzan, The Invaders, Night Gallery and Freddy’s Nightmares. (Died 1990.)
- Born February 13, 1932 — David Neal. He had a number of genre roles including showing up on the 1980 Flash Gordon as Captain of Ming’s Air Force. He would be on Doctor Who during the time of The Fifth Doctor for the “The Caves of Androzani” story”. And he played, and I kid you not, the Dish of the Day in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. (Died 2000.)
- Born February 13, 1938 — Oliver Reed. He first shows up in a genre film uncredited in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, with his first credited role being Leon in The Curse of the Werewolf. He was King in The Damned, an SF despite its title, and Z.P.G. saw him cast as Russ McNeil. Next up was him as Athos in the very charming Three Musketeers, a role he reprised in Four Musketeers and Return of the Musketeers. And can we skip past him as Sarm in Gor please? Does Royal Flash count as genre? Kage Baker loved that rogue. Kage also loved The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in which he played Vulcan. Orpheus & Eurydice has him as Narrator, his final film role. At least I’m reasonably sure it is. (Died 1999.)
- Born February 13, 1943 — Leo Frankowski. Probably best known for his Conrad Stargard series featuring the Polish time travelling engineer Conrad Schwartz, but I’m more fond of his stand-alone novels Fata Morgana (most superb) and Copernick’s Rebellion. (Died 2008.)
- Born February 13, 1944 — Michael Ensign, 78. One of these performers whose showed up in multiple Trek series, to wit The Next Generation where he played a Malcorian, on Deep Space Nine where he was a Vulcan, on Voyager where he was a Takarian and Enterprise where he’s another Vulcan. Impressive indeed!
- Born February 13, 1959 — Maureen F. McHugh, 63. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, was nominated for the Hugo at ConFrancisco and the Nebula Award as well, and won the Otherwise Award, impressive indeed. Her other novels are Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child and Nekropolis. She has an excellent collection of short stories.
(7) COMICS SECTION.
- Thatababy has an improbably science fictional gag compared to its usual fare.
- Sarah Andersen dropped in for a visit.
(8) EYE SPY. Paul Weimer shares his impressions of a long-awaited John M. Ford reissue in “Microreview: Scholars of Night” at Nerds of a Feather.
…But as far as what to expect, and maybe have a hope of staying ahead of Ford in reading it for the first time, you need to know which espionage writers influenced Ford.
In his introduction, Charles Stross, whose Laundry Files and Merchant Princes novels have borrowed, if not been nearly pastiches of, various espionage novel authors, provides a Rosetta Stone, a cryptography key, to what Ford was doing here. Ford’s inspiration, model, and some might even say passion is Anthony Price. Anthony Price’s Dr David Audley/Colonel Jack Butler novels are counter espionage thrillers and highly regarded in that genre. I’ve never read any of them, but I know enough about espionage thrillers, both novels and movies, to fit into the plot, characters and story quite well. It is no coincidence that George Smiley (of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) gets invoked on more than one occasion….
(9) INCRYPTID SERIES. Also at Nerds of a Feather, Joe Sherry calls this Seanan McGuire book “The culmination of a long and satisfying journey” — “Microreview [book]: Spelunking Through Hell, by Seanan McGuire”.
…You *could* go into this book cold and enjoy and appreciate Spelunking Through Hell. Seanan McGuire is really, really good at setting up the beginning of a novel with just enough recap and context to pull the reader along. I just wouldn’t know what that looks like because I’ve hooked on this series since book one and I’ve read all of McGuire’s Incryptid stories on Patreon that’s been filling in the family history up through Alice and Thomas. I can’t get my mind in the place to understand what cold reading would look like. I’m invested….
(10) AT 90. The New York Times profiles the composer in “John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies”.
…George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” said Williams was the “secret sauce” of the franchise. While the two sometimes disagreed, he said Williams did not hesitate to try out new material, including when Lucas initially rejected his scoring of a well-known scene in which Luke Skywalker gazes at a desert sunset.
“You normally have, with a composer, giant egos, and wanting to argue about everything, and ‘I want it to be my score, not your score,’” Lucas said. “None of that existed with John.”…
(11) NEBULA WINNER. Screen Rant tells how “Karen Gillan Trolls James Gunn Over Adding More GOTG 3 Nebula Scenes”.
…As production continues on the film, James Gunn took to Twitter to share a behind-the-scenes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 image. The writer/director revealed Gillan has been trolling him on the set of the film by sneaking in drawings to his shot plans in an effort to get more Nebula scenes, to which the actress hilariously and seemingly confirmed her hijinks in a follow-up post. Check out the funny posts below:
(12) THE CROWN JOULES. BBC News says there’s a “Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy”.
European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion – the energy process that powers the stars.
The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.
If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.
The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).
This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
It’s not a massive energy output – only enough to boil about 60 kettles’ worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France….
(13) NUKES. Mental Floss reminds readers “When The Day After Terrorized 100 Million Viewers With a Vision of Nuclear War” in this 2018 post.
…Preempting Hardcastle and McCormick on ABC, the 8 p.m. telefilm drew a staggering 100 million viewers, an audience that at the time was second only in non-sports programming to the series finale of M*A*S*H. According to Nielsen, 62 percent of all televisions in use that night were tuned in.
What they watched didn’t really qualify as entertainment; Meyer stated he had no desire to make a “good” movie with stirring performances or rousing music, but a deeply affecting public service announcement on the horrors of a nuclear fallout. He succeeded … perhaps a little too well….
(14) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. YouTube’s Broadway Classixs praises a famous sff movie sequence:“Things To Come 1936 – Stereo – Building The New World – Arthur Bliss”.
I’ve always loved this sequence – the gorgeous miniatures, amazing effects, and perfect score – so I synched Ramon Gamba’s recording to the film.
And if the music hooks you, then here’s another excerpt: “March from ‘Things to Come’ – Sir Arthur Bliss conducts”.
Bliss composed one of the most famous British film scores for the 1936 production of H. G. Wells’ “Things to Come.” Here he conducts its March on a Reader’s Digest LP with the New Philharmonia Orchestra (recorded 1967). Note: This has now been released on a ‘Classic Recordings Quarterly’ CD entitled “A Tribute Sir Arthur Bliss” (CRQ Editions CRQ CD 283) which also features Bliss conducting the music of Rossini, Borodin, Handel, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Parry and Arne.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Hampus Eckerman, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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(2) very interesting.
Thanks for the title credit again!
3) I really got a kick out of “Danny Dunn and the Anti-gravity Paint” when I was ten years old. I found it in, of all places, my church’s lending library. I think I read it just after my first exposure to some of the Heinlein juveniles. Later on, I realized Danny Dunn’s paint wasn’t that much different from cavorite, or for that matter, Rocky & Bullwinkle’s upsidaisium.
5) I first saw “Cabaret” in 1971, as a theatrical play produced by my college’s drama troupe. It really impressed me. I wasn’t as fond of the movie; it seemed to lose something compared to the stage play (we had an excellent troupe at my college). Still a good movie, though.
(13) We didn’t watch that one. But we did watch “Testament”, which is hard to take.
(1) My first professional sale to a major mag was to F&SF, a short short called “Love Object.” I heart Valentine’s Day. Even one 40 years ago. Great memories of how that felt.
13) As I recall “The Day After” was heavily hyped and in my part of Canada at least was broadcast at the same time as Olivier’s late career tv “King Lear”. I watched the latter and was pleased with myself for resisting the hype and choosing the better and more serious option. In retrospect it was probably the right choice. I never did see “The Day After”.
Jeanne (Sourdough) Jackson says I first saw “Cabaret” in 1971, as a theatrical play produced by my college’s drama troupe. It really impressed me. I wasn’t as fond of the movie; it seemed to lose something compared to the stage play (we had an excellent troupe at my college). Still a good movie, though.
I’ve never seen it as a play but I can see how it, like Leiber’s The Big Time, it would would work well as a theater performance. Both are self-contained and wouldn’t need much in the way of stage setting to work superbly.
(7) Tolkien fandom
I don’t engage with Tolkien fandom because my impression is that it’s dominated by movie-LOTR fans, and I’m a book fan. There’s nothing wrong with loving the movie version, but I don’t*, so there isn’t much for me to say about it.
*I saw the movies once when they came out and never saw them again. I mostly enjoyed them, but I will never, ever, forgive them for making Treebeard stupid.
(14) “The Day After” and “Threads” were about the two most depressing movies I have ever watched.
That was the night I had my appendix out. It’s a wonder I could sleep.
Nancy Sauer says I saw the movies once when they came out and never saw them again. I mostly enjoyed them, but I will never, ever, forgive them for making Treebeard stupid.
I got as far as The Fellowship of The Ring and that was quite enough, thank you. I love the novels and saw no reason to continue with films that at best were, from my viewpoint, a poor take on a superb fiction experience.
It’s why I never bothered watching The Hobbit Films.
I have to admit that the pictures I’ve seen of the LotR movies are very pretty.
(12) So it’s like Moore’s Law only with a doubling time of 25 years instead of 18 months.
I haven’t seen THINGS TO COME in a long time and I bet it’s dated BADLY but Sir Athur Bliss turnedi in a great score and I was happy to hear excerpts from it.
Oh, I missed the deadline for “Superb Scroll Sunday”. Maybe next year?
1) Thanks for the link, Mike
13) I watched both The Day After and Threads (as well as On the Beach, The War Game and Testament).
IMO, Threads and The War Game are the most harrowing ones of the bunch.Testament is the worst.
The Day After lost me, when some West German city, either Würzburg or Wuppertal, gets nuked and hardly anybody on screen cares. The annoying oldest daughter of that farmer family even whines, “Why should I care about German cities getting bombed? What about meeee and my wedding?” So I found it hard to care about Kansas City getting nuked.
3) I’m not sure whether I read that particular volume, but I have fond memories of some unspecified number of Danny Dunn books from my childhood.
5) Those who like Cabaret may like Babylon Berlin, on Netflix in at least some jurisdictions.
13) Succeeded too well? Succeeded enough, I would say.
14) When I was in grade school, Things to Come was always on cable, similar to Beastmaster a few years later. Somehow I never watched it.
Also, if you like Babylon Berlin, do read the Geroen Rath mysteries by Volker Kutscher that the show is (loosely) based on. The first five or six have been translated into English and they’re very good and impeccably researched historical mysteries. Better than the TV show IMO, which leans too much into the clichés created by Cabaret.
I was seriously freaked out by The Day After, probably because I’d been primed for it by all that ‘duck and cover’ in the sixties. If they had made and shown it back then, I’d likely still be under my desk.
Looking forward to the new Tolkien/Ring series, if only for those gorgeous backdrops.
“Our files are protected by Mutual Assured Pixellation.”
The Day After was mainly interesting to me because of the setting in Lawrence Kansas and Kansas City. I had recently graduated from K.U. and scenes using Allen Field House and shots of Kansas City going up were unnerving. Looking at the Wikipedia summary, it hit even closer to home with Joplin, Mo, close to where I grew up in SE Kansas. Although I do note that Jason Robards goes to Lawrence to teach at the K.U. Medical Center, which is actually in Kansas City (which is where my father had some surgeries done and one of my sisters went there for her nursing degree). Nitpicking 40 years late, I guess.
I really love both the LOTR books and the Jackson movies. (Heck, I even have a soft spot for the older messed-up movies — I can still hum “Frodo of the Nine Fingers And the Ring of Doom”, and “Where There’s A Whip, There’s A Way” and “In the Valley, Ha Ha!”). But I still had to keep myself from shouting out in rage in the theater when I saw what Jackson did with Faramir.
The Hobbit movies are almost entirely a complete waste of time, though I did like Benedryl Cummerbund as Smaug.
There was lots wrong with the LOTR movies, and also lots right. I was upset about Faramir, too, and about Frodo sending Sam away. I could forgive Elves at Helm’s Deep, but personality changes were a no go for me.
I watched the first Hobbit movie and found myself continually saying, “That didn’t happen!” I never watched the other two. It offended me.
The Hobbit movies offended me too, but I did watch them all. Perhaps the worst was when the Arrakis sandworms entered the Battle Of The Five Armies. Or the bit where Legolas climbs up a series of falling blocks of ice using them as stairs as if in some sort of platformer video game. The mine cart chase in the first and the barrel chase in the second were also suspiciously like video game set pieces.
As you say, Lenore, the good outweighed – by far, for me – the bad in the LOTR movies. Except for Legolas using his shield as a skateboard at Hems Deep. That was too much.
8 Thanks for the link on my post
9 And on behalf of the blog, thanks for the link for Joe’s piece.
@cliff when watching the mine cart chase I thought “they are doing this FOR the video game adaptation
Obviously, I’ll watch the Amazon series. I do like the Jackson LotR movies, apart from the bits (the ones Lenore Jones mentioned in particular) that fill me with incandescent rage. The Hobbit movies are just … exhausting.
The 1977 Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit, however (which was worked on by some of the folks who’d ultimately end up in Studio Ghibli, and which was my first introduction to Tolkien) is oddly kind of perfect, and I really wish it’d get a properly-remastered HD rerelease.
Meredith moment: David Macaulay’s quite stellar Pyramid is available from the usual suspects for two dollars and ninety nine cents.
3) Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint holds a special place in my heart; it was published the year I was born and it was the first youth themed sf book that I loved to read repeatedly as a ten year old. This book, along with Star Trek, was my introduction into the wild and wide world of science fiction…
@Paul – I wondered the same thing.
(13) I watched it and it had a big impact on me. The scene where the survivors in Lawrence were trying to contact the outside world and having no luck has stuck with me. The repeated line “This is Lawrence, Kansas, is anybody there?” still wanders through my mind occasionally. It was extremely effective filmmaking.
And on that depressing note – Happy Valentine’s Day to those who partake!
My first thought about the mine cart chase was: “That’s a ride coming to a Hobbit theme park soon.”
I loved the LotR movies. There captured Middle Earth beautifully. They were by no means perfect, but were about as good as one could hope for. I didn’t agree with some of the changes but then I have a fairly low bar ever since Lynch’s “Dune”. “The Hobbit” had no need to be a trilogy of movies, there was so much unnecessary padding. I still watched them, but it was more for completeness sake.
I read and loved every Danny Dunn book. Got the whole set for my own children to read. First scifi I ever read.
The Fellowship of the Ring was strongly improved in the extended edition, which did a lot more with Lothlorien and the like.
As the trilogy went on it became clearer that the theatrical releases were intentionally excluding things that would be missed by book fans to make them buy the extended editions later, leaving the purely theatrical a poorer shadow of the real thing … even as the extended ones also added more and more nonsense and cruft (three million skulls was unnecessary and terrible, but basically chopping out Saruman’s entire death from the theatre was just rude.)
The extended edition also undid some of the worst of what was done to Faramir.
This continued with the Hobbit. The Tolkien Edit (a four hour or less cut taken from all three Hobbit films) which does feats like get the random extra elves out of things like the barrel riding and gets rid of the rather dreadful love story, is the best of the theatrical editions, and worth watching to see what was done right or almost right, but only the extended edition actually gives Beorn his fair share. I don’t like having to sit through Tauroel’s calf eyes to get the bits that should be there as they were taken from the source.
Another Meredith Moment: Liz Williams‘ The Demon and the City is available from the usual suspects for a buck ninety nine. Liz was another author that ran afoul of the unsavory business practices of Nightshade.
Meredith Moment: Martha Wells’ The Wizard Hunters is $1.99 at the usual suspects.
@Soon Lee: My sentiments exactly. I would rank them Fellowship of the Ring (that movie is just about perfect), Return of the King, Two Towers; the extended cuts are in all three cases better than the theatrical edits.
Re: Jackson’s Hobbit: there’s something between one good three-hour and two good two-hour films buried in that trilogy.
The discussion of Cabaret just reminded me of a filk song I wrote sometime in the 1980s, based on experiences with two Worldcons in two different cities. I think most of it is still applicable today:
TOMORROW BELONGS TO—WHO?
(tune: Tomorrow Belongs to Me, from Cabaret)
We’ve just run a con for three hundred-odd fans,
Well-organized down to a T.
Let’s go for the gold and bid for Worldcon–
Tomorrow belongs to me!
The voting is less than a year down the pike,
We’ll wow ’em with parties so free.
Our budget must go for food, cokes and bheer–
Tomorrow belongs to me!
Our hotels are grand, and our con center, too,
The pride of our native city.
We won’t tell a soul they’re spread all o’er town.
Tomorrow belongs to me!
Our image is fine, we are young and we’re strong,
We’ve scads of great publicity.
We’ve swept inexperience ‘neath the rug.
Tomorrow belongs to me!
We’re at the Worldcon; they are balloting now,
Campaigning’s as tough as can be.
Our parties should pull us the votes we need.
Tomorrow belongs to me!
They’ve counted the votes. WE’VE WON IT AT LAST!
Let’s celebrate our victory!
But why do the smofs snicker in their bheer?
Tomorrow belongs to me!
Tomorrow belongs,
Tomorrow belongs,
Tomorrow belongs to me!
–Sourdough Jackson, around 1985
(13) Millennials and GenZ have lived through some awful stuff, but I’m not convinced it’s the same kind of trauma as Boomers and GenX. I mean, school shootings (just for instance) are horrific, but I’m not convinced it’s the same as several occasions on which we were actually or apparently on the very verge of a full nuclear exchange and the end of the humanity, seeing the Doomsday Clock on the news semi-regularly, and movies like The Day After being so very, very plausible.
Wargames was 1983, too.
@Lis: I often wonder how younger folks react to pre1989 television and movies that allude to the possibility of nuclear apocalypse – because i remember that even the silliest programs could allude to it and evoke (back then) a frisson of real dread – does it still do that today for folks who were not there then?
Oliver Reed’s last film was Gladiator. He died during the filming and they had do some rewriting and creative editing to take it into account.
Troyce says Oliver Reed’s last film was Gladiator. He died during the filming and they had do some rewriting and creative editing to take it into account.
Actually his last released film it turns out was Orpheus & Eurydice that he narrated. It might’ve been filmed earlier than Gladiator.
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