Think of this as the Emergency Holographic Scroll. I spent six hours today accompanying my mother to her eye doctor appointment. No problems out of the ordinary for a 95-year-old, but we were in the office for three of those hours. Thank goodness for Cat’s birthdays!

(1) IT’S GETTING EASIER BEING GREEN. “Tatiana Maslany Confirms That Her SHE-HULK Will Be Completely Computer Generated” at GeekTyrant.

When you think of the character Hulk over the years, you may think of Lou Ferrigno, who played him in CBS’s series The Incredible Hulk from 1978 to 1982, and in three made-for-TV movies from 1988 to 1990. This was a classic ‘80s TV imagining of Bruce Banner’s alter-ego, and the best they could do at the time. Since then, we have gotten a much more advanced version, with Mark Ruffalo in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thanks to computer generated technology.

This is the best way for us to see a character that grows so massive in size, and so it makes sense that the new series She-Hulk will utilize that same tech. Star of the series, Tatiana Maslany, recently sat down with the Scott Hasn’t Seen podcast (via The Direct), and she said:

“It’s all CG… I’m in mo-cap the whole time. I’m on platforms with mo-cap where I have a little head on the top of my head…”

(2) ON SHOGGOTH TIME. Literary Hub reports “A novelist is suing Amazon for selling “centuries-old” copies of his book for over $1000”. Will R. suggests, “Maybe it was written in the dating system used by the File 770 comment box?”

…As the New York Times reported in a larger piece, Boland found copies of his book Hominid listed on Amazon as having been published in the seventeenth-century and priced between $907 and $987. (The book’s actual price is $15.) Another book of his was listed on Amazon for $1008, when Boland himself sold the book for $7.

In the suit, Boland says Amazon breached its publishing services agreement with him, and allowed him to be defamed by selling fake editions of his books: “When a seller claims to have a 1602 edition that it’s charging nearly $1,000 for, it’s defaming me by implying that the book existed before I wrote it — i.e., that I’m a plagiarist,” Boland told the Times….

(3) CHANGE IN DATE. The SFWA Board of Directors has postponed the organization’s Winter Business Meeting to January 15. Members were provided a link to connect with the meeting.

Due to a scheduling conflict, we are unable to provide closed captioning for our planned business meeting on this Saturday, December 11. To make sure the meeting is accessible for as many of our members as possible, and to honor the holiday season, we’re postponing the meeting until Saturday, January 15.

…We will livestream video of the business meeting at the above link, and all members will be able to ask questions in real-time via the text chat on that same page, in addition to the closed captioning we will provide. 

(4) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1990 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Thirty-one years ago on this evening, Edward Scissorhands premiered. It was directed by Tim Burton. It was produced by Burton and Denise Di Novi, and written by Caroline Thompson from a story by her and Burton. The cast was Johnny Depp, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Alan Arkin. 

Reception for it was quite positive with the Rolling Stone saying of it that: “Burton’s richly entertaining update of the Frankenstein story is the year’s most comic, romantic and haunting film fantasy.”  That it won a Hugo Award at Chicon V where Marta Randall was Toastmaster isn’t surprising. (Other nominated works were Total Recall, Ghost, Back to The Future III and The Witches.) The box office was very good, it made nearly ninety million against a cost of twenty million. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a near perfect rating of ninety one percent. 

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

• Born December 7, 1915 — Leigh Brackett. Let’s us praise her first for her Retro Hugo at CoNZealand for Shadow Over Mars, originally published in the Fall 1944 issue of Startling Stories. Now surely her scripts for The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye are genre adjacent? Why not? Ok then her very pulpy Sea-Kings of Mars is? Being rhetorical there. And I love her Eric John Stark stories! (Much of these were written with her husband Edmond Hamilton.) And yes, she completed The Empire Strikes Back script just before she died. Is that the actual shooting script? And she was the first woman nominated for the Hugo Award at NYCon II for The Long Tomorrow novel.  (Died 1978.)
• Born December 7, 1923 — Johnny Duncan. Was the Sixties Batman the first Batman series? i know you know better. Johnny here was Robin on Batman And Robin, the1949 series for Columbia Pictures Corporation. It ran for fifteen episodes of roughly fifteen or so minutes apiece. Robert Lowery was Wayne / Batman. He has only one other genre appearance, an uncredited one in Plan 9 from Outer Space as Second Stretcher Bearer. He does show up in the genre adjacent Thirties and Forties Charley Chan series in several roles. (Died 2016.)
• Born December 7, 1945 — W.D. Richter, 76. As a screenwriter, he’s given us Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Dracula, and one of my most loved films, Big Trouble In Little China.  As a director, he gave us Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, another of my most loved films. He’s not getting love for the reboot of Big Trouble In Little China with Dwayne Johnson that he’s apparently involved with. Grrrr! (Update as of September this year though Dwayne is being stubborn and says he’s still trying: Carpenter’s legal team axed it as he has full veto rights over any remake. Yea!) 
• Born December 7, 1947 — Wendy Padbury, 74. She’s Zoe Heriot, a Companion to the Second Doctor. She first appears in “The Wheel in Space” where she is the librarian on board the Wheel. Big Finish has made use of her character rather well. Her only genre film was Cathy Vespers in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (not on my to be viewed list), and she was regular cast member Sue Wheeler in the Freewheelers series which is at least genre adjacent. Think Avengers only younger. 
• Born December 7, 1949 — Tom Waits, 72. He’s got uncredited (but obviously known) roles in Wolfen and The Fisher King. He is in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as R.M. Renfield, and he shows up in Mystery Men as Doc Heller and in Mr.Nick in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. He’s simply Engineer in The Book of Eli. He also shows up in the recent zombie film The Dead Don’t Die which also has Danny Glover, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop and Carol Kane to name a few of the performers involved.
• Born December 7, 1953 — Madeleine E Robins, 68. I’m very fond of her Sarah Tolerance series which starts often Point of Honour, it features a female PI in an alternate version of Georgian London. The Stone War set in a post-apocalyptic NYC is quite interesting as well, and she has quite a bit short fiction, though only three have been collected so far in Luckstones: Three Tales of Meviel. 
• Born December 7, 1985 — S. A. Chakraborty, 36. Her eighteenth century set Daevabad Trilogy with its djinns is quite excellent. It has been nominated for a Best Series Hugo this year. In the past, the series or the individual novels have been nominated for a number of other Awards including a BFA, a World Fantasy Award and a Compton. So far, I don’t see any other novel length fiction from her. 

(6) ANOTHER BIRTHDAY BOY. Also born December 7, singer Louis Prima. See rare footage here of Prima and the story behind the song, “I Wanna Be Like You” from Walt Disney’s animated feature The Jungle Book (1967) where he voiced the raucous orangutan King Louie. He also recorded two albums with Phil Harris: The Jungle Book and More Jungle Book and other such works for Disneyland Records. 

(7) VIDEO OF THE DAY. On Monday’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host referenced Keith Laumer’s Bolo during his Cyborgasm segment on killing machines.

In this edition of “Cyborgasm,” Stephen Colbert examines the U.S. military’s decision to test robotic tanks while New Zealand urges the world to ban the deployment of killer robots.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Rob Thornton, Will R., Jeffrey Smith, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Streetcar-Named-Dern.]