An abbreviated Scroll, partly because of the family gathering today, and partly because my energy is drained by the proverbial flu-like symptoms….

(1) GRRM ON COLBERT. George R.R. Martin visited The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his new book Fire and Blood.

From ET Canada: “George R.R. Martin Shares His Turtle-y Inspiration For ‘Game Of Thrones’ On ‘Colbert’”

Colbert opened the interview by complimenting the “purple turtle” brooch Martin was wearing on his shirt and asking what it meant.

“I love turtles,” Martin said. “That’s how my writing career began, with turtles.”

The 70-year-old explained: “I lived in Bayonne, New Jersey, the federal housing projects there. We were not allowed to have dogs. We were not allowed to have cats. So the only pets I was allowed to have were turtles, little dime store turtles.

“The thing is about those little dime store turtles is that they die very soon,” he continued. “And I couldn’t figure out why they would die, but it wasn’t my fault, so I decided that they were competing for the Turtle Throne. They were killing each other to determine who would be the Turtle King. So that was my first fantasy, Turtle Castle, it preceded Game of Thrones by many years.”

 

(2) REAL LIFE DRAGON. Inverse says that “NASA Announces Test Flight for SpaceX Crew Dragon”. The uncrewed test is now scheduled for early next year. The first crewed test would follow in a few month’s time.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took a step closer to reality on Wednesday, as NASA announced that the company will launch its first test flight for the capsule in just two months’ time. The unmanned test will pave the way for a manned test in the summer of 2019, which will see the first American astronauts enter space on board a commercial spacecraft.

The “Demo-1” uncrewed test flight will take place on Monday, January 7, 2019. The Crew Dragon spacecraft will be sent up on a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at Launch Complex 39A. In a press statement, the agency said the launch would provide “data on the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket, Crew Dragon spacecraft, and ground systems, as well as on-orbit, docking and landing operations,” as well as “valuable data toward NASA certifying SpaceX’s crew transportation system for carrying astronauts to and from the space station.”

(3) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

• November 22, 1932 – Robert Vaughn, Actor of Stage and Screen and Director, whose best-known genre work was as Napoleon Solo in the 1960s series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (with a cameo in its short-lived spinoff The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.), but his first genre appearance was in the Roger Corman “gem” Teenage Cave Man in 1958. Other genre roles were in Escape to Witch Mountain, Starship Invasions, The Lucifer Complex, Virus, Hangar 18, Battle Beyond the Stars, Superman III, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. (seriously, who penned that title?), Demon Seed, Transylvania Twist, and Witch Academy. (he did do some awful films!) (Died 2016.)
• November 22, 1940 – Terry Gilliam, 78, Oscar-nominated Writer, Actor, and Animator. OGH is going to growl here, but there is no way to be brief when it comes to Terry Gilliam. He’s directed twelves films, of which the vast majority are firmly genre, tending to surrealism, and have garnered him a multitude of awards and nominations. I’ve seen Brazil (which was responsible for his Oscar nod), Time Bandits, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Twelve Monkeys – all five of which were finalists for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award – and The Fisher King and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Yes, I skipped past his start as the animator for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which grew out of his love for the children’s series Do Not Adjust Your Set – which had staff of Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Though he largely was the animator in the Python series and films, according to his autobiography, he did occasionally take acting roles – particularly roles no one else wanted, such those requiring extensive makeup. He also co-directed a number of scenes. His most recent are The Brothers Grimm, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Tideland, The Zero Theorem, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Heath Ledger’s last film). SFF author Kage Baker was a big fan of his; she did reviews of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits for Green Man Review.
• November 22, 1958 – Jamie Lee Curtis, 60, Can we agree that she was the best Scream Queen for her film debut in the 1978 Halloween film in which she played the role of Laurie Strode? No? Well that’s my claim. She followed up with yet more horror films, The Fog and Prom Night. In all of them, she’s the only character that survives. She would reprise the role of Laurie in four sequels, including Halloween H20, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween II, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch. She shows up in one up of my fav SF films, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as Sandra Banzai, but you’ll need to see the director’s extended version, as she’s only seen there. Is True Lies really genre? Probably not, but for her performance, Curtis won a Golden Globe Award and a Saturn Award. Damned impressive, I’d say. No, I’m not listing all her films here, as OGH would likely start growling. Suffice to say, she’s had a very impressive career, just in genre works alone.
• November 22, 1984 – Scarlett Johansson, 34, Actor of Stage and Screen, Singer, and Producer. She is best known, perhaps, for her role as the Black Widow in the MCU films, but she has had other genre appearances, including Her (for which she won a Saturn Award), Lucy, Ghost World, the Hugo-nominated The Prestige, The Island, Eight Legged Freaks, The Spirit, Under the Skin, and notably as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell – a production which was controversial for whitewashing the cast, particularly her character, who was supposed to be Japanese.

(4) COMICS SECTION.

• In this Non Sequitur, we learn how to transform the world.

(5) HERO POSTER. Gizmodo/io9 has highlighted a poster with over 100 movie characters (second in a series of such) and challenged you to try to identify them all (“Good Luck Finding All the References in This Mega Movie Mashup”).

What would happen if over 100 heroes and villains from science fiction got together in a room and just went nuts? A new poster answers that question with one word: insanity.

The poster is called RAID 2: Incident on Line 13, and it’s the second in a series by artists Josan Gonzalez and Laurie Greasley. You may even remember RAID 1, as we featured it on the site. For RAID 2, though, things have gotten even more manic, with a ton of awesome characters kicking the shit out of each other, all together in one beautiful print. Check it out.

Prints both are available at the Hero Complex Gallery website or, you can visit this link to enter a contest for a free copy of RAID 2.

(6) JDA. Well, I’m not going to let this go to my head — of course we look good next to Comicsgaters, whose verbal assaults caused Jon Del Arroz to shut down his Twitter account. “I Guess The File 770 Guys Ain’t So Bad…” [Internet Archive link]

These last two weeks have been hellish to say the least. I haven’t talked about a lot of stuff on the personal front, but if you’re following along on social media, you’ve seen some folk absolutely lose their minds at your favorite humble Hispanic author (me). My understanding is that my leaving twitter has only escalated the situations to where they’re not even coherent anymore….

But you came for the clickbait headline here, and I have to say with all honesty, I prefer the File 770 folk to this current crop of trolls for a couple of reasons.

One, the Filers insults aren’t typically full time. There’s a couple who just are obnoxious, but for the most part they’re very tame compared to the stuff I’ve been getting lately — and moreover, almost all of them voiced concerns over my family’s health and wished good health in recent posts. I actually really appreciate that and was pretty touched they remembered and cared….

(7) TROUBLE IN THE TARDIS? [Item by Olav Rokne.] Rumors are swirling about discontent behind the scenes at Doctor Who. Starlog reported yesterday that new show runner Chris Chibnall may leave the show after an abbreviated season in 2019, reports go on to speculate that Jodie Whittaker may follow suit in solidarity. Given the new life they have breathed into the series, it would be extremely disappointing to see them leave. “Are Jodie Whittaker and the new ‘Doctor Who’ showrunner leaving already?” at NME:

A report in the long-running science-fiction magazine Starburst says that Chibnall is dissatisfied with the way the show is being run behind-the-scenes by the BBC. Whittaker, who previously worked with Chibnall on the hit ITV drama Broadchurch, is said to be leaving the show in sympathy for her friend and colleague.

(8) LION KING. Variety provides background for the Lion King teaser trailer.

The first look at the live-action/CGI remake of “The Lion King” is finally online.

Disney released the teaser trailer on Thursday as part of the Thanksgiving football festivities, replicating the opening scene of the beloved 1994 original animated film.

 

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Olav Rokne, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]