Pixel Scroll 8/5/22 Welcome To The Scrolltel California. You Can Pixel Out Anytime But You Can Never Leave

(1) HWA ELECTIONS UPCOMING. The Horror Writers Association will be holding elections for President, Secretary, and three Trustee positions in September.

John Edward Lawson is running unopposed for President, and Becky Spratford is the lone candidate for Secretary.

The candidates for the three Trustee positions are Marc L. Abbott, Linda Addison, James Chambers, Ellen Datlow, Anthony Gambol, Sèphera Girón, Douglas Gwilym, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, Eugene Johnson, Stephen Mark Rainey, David Rose, Lindy Ryan, and John F.D. Taff.

The candidates’ statements are here. The elected officers will hold their respective offices for terms of two years, beginning on November 1 and ending on October 31.

(2) KEENE HEALTH UPDATE. Horror writer Brian Keene is positive for Covid-19 – and has symptoms — so he alerted Facebook readers who might have come in contact with him at last weekend’s Scares That Care Charity Weekend VIII.  

For those who had me sign their books or take a selfie with them this past weekend: I have just tested positive for Covid-19. As you saw, I was pretty militant about keeping my mask on, so I hopefully didn’t spread it. But you deserve a heads up, regardless. My symptoms are more than mild but less than severe. Will be quarantining at home.

(3) LITERARY CONTACT TRACING. David Agranoff, host of the DickHeads Podcast, says the evidence suggests Philip K. Dick based a Ubik character in part on Robert Lichtman. Thread starts here.

(4) WRITERS GETTING PAID. Deadline reports “WGA Wins $42 Million ‘Self-Dealing’ Arbitration Against Netflix”.

The WGA said today that it has prevailed in a huge “self-dealing” arbitration against Netflix that it says will result in hundreds of writers on more than 100 Netflix theatrical films receiving an additional $42 million in unpaid residuals. The WGA West and the WGA East say they now are pursuing about $13.5 million in interest that Netflix reportedly owes writers for late payment of these residuals.

In a notification to their members, the guilds said that their victory stems from “an important arbitration over Netflix’s underpayment of the writer’s residuals for the theatrical motion picture Bird Box. Netflix argued the WGA should accept a substandard formula the company negotiated with DGA and SAG-AFTRA. After a hearing, however, an arbitrator determined differently — that the license fee should have been greater than the gross budget of the film. He ordered Netflix to pay the writer a total of $850,000 in residuals along with full interest of $350,000.”

“As a direct result of this ruling,” the WGA added, “216 writers on 139 other Netflix theatrical films are receiving an additional $42 million in unpaid residuals. The guild is now pursuing approximately $13.5 million in interest Netflix also owes writers for late payment of these residuals.”

The meaning of self-dealing and its consequences were explained by the guilds in their message to members:

“When a theatrical is licensed or released in any other market – like streaming or television or home video – residuals must be paid on revenues earned in those markets. The typical residual for the credited writer is 1.2% of the license fee paid to the producer for the right to exhibit that film.

“If the license is between related parties – for example, when Netflix is both the producer and the distributor of the film — the MBA requires that the company impute a license fee based on arm’s length transactions between unrelated parties of comparable pictures — for example, a Sony film licensed to Netflix. This critical definition, negotiated as part of the resolution of our strike in 2008, protects against the undervaluation of license fees through self-dealing.

“Rather than follow the established MBA definition for related party transactions (which exists in the DGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements with the AMPTP as well), Netflix negotiated new deals with the DGA and SAG-AFTRA that allow Netflix to pay residuals on significantly less than the cost of the film. Netflix then tried to force the WGA to take this ‘pattern’ deal. Since it was clear the new formula negotiated by the other Guilds undervalued these ‘imputed’ license fees, the Guild instead took the dispute to arbitration.

“During the arbitration, the Guild showed that when Netflix licensed comparable theatrical films from third party producers it almost always paid a license fee that exceeded the budget. The industry refers to this model as ‘cost-plus.’ The Guild argued that Netflix must apply this cost-plus model to its own films and impute license fees in excess of the budget for the purpose of paying residuals. The arbitrator agreed and ruled that the license fee should be 111% of the gross budget of the film.”

(5) A “FAN FICTION” CAUSE CÉLÈBRE. Meanwhile, Netflix lawyers are busy spreading joy in another direction, suing the Grammy-winning team behind an unofficial Bridgerton musical: “Netflix Sues ‘Bridgerton The Musical’ Creators For Infringement, Seeks to Halt Live Stagings”Deadline has the details. From the complaint: “Barlow & Bear’s conduct began on social media, but stretches ‘fan fiction’ well past its breaking point.” (Read the full complaint here.)

 …Songwriting duo Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear were the minds behind the popular adaptation of the hit television series. They staged a live concert of “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical Album Live in Concert” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC earlier this week, selling out the venue.

Netflix originally hailed the concept when it debuted as a free online homage. But when that expanded into a profitable business, things became sticky.

“Defendants Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear and their companies (“Barlow & Bear”) have taken valuable intellectual property from the Netflix original series Bridgerton to build an international brand for themselves,” the lawsuit stated. “Bridgerton reflects the creative work and hard- earned success of hundreds of artists and Netflix employees. Netflix owns the exclusive right to create Bridgerton songs, musicals, or any other derivative works based on Bridgerton. Barlow & Bear cannot take that right—made valuable by others’ hard work—for themselves, without permission. Yet that is exactly what they have done.”…

(6) SOA AWARDS TAKING SUBMISSIONS. The Society of Authors 2023 Awards are open, including new prize to encourage disability representation in literature, called the ADCI (Authors with Disabilities & Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize. Entries are being taken through October 31.

Launched in 2022, the ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize seeks to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature.

Founded by author Penny Batchelor and publisher Clare Christian together with the Society of Authors, the prize is generously sponsored by Arts Council England, ALCS, the Drusilla Harvey Memorial Fund, the Hawthornden Literary Retreat, and the Professional Writing Academy. 

Open to authors with a disability and/or chronic illness, the prize will call for entries of novels which include a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. The winner will receive £1,000 and two runners-up £500 each.

(7) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to catch up with Sam J. Miller over khachapuri in episode 177 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Sam J. Miller

It’s time to settle in for another lunch during the Washington, D.C. pop culture festival Awesome Con. Last episode, you eavesdropped on my meal with Patrick O’Leary, and this time around you get to take a seat at the table with Sam J. Miller.

You first heard me chat and chew with Sam 5-1/2 years ago in Episode 24, and when I noted he’d be at the con to promote his debut short story collection Boys, Beasts & Men, I knew it was time for us to catch up.

So much has changed since I last shared him with you in late 2016! His first novel, The Art of Starving, was published the following year and was a finalist for the 2018 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and won the 2018 Andre Norton Award. Blackfish City, published in 2018, won the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and was named a best book of the year by Vulture, the Washington Post, and Barnes & Noble, as well as a must-read for Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. His second young adult novel, Destroy All Monsters, was published by HarperTeen in 2019, and his second adult novel, The Blade Between, was published by Ecco Press in 2020.

We discussed the 1,500 short story submissions he made between 2002 and 2012 (as well as the one story which was rejected 99 times), the peculiar importance of the missing comma from the title of his new collection Boys, Beasts & Men, his technique for reading collections written by others, why the Clarion Writing Workshop was transformative, how Samuel R. Delany gave him permission, the way his novels and short stories exist in a shared universe, the impossibility of predicting posthumous fame, the superpower he developed via decades of obscurity, the differing ideas of what writers block means, and much more.

(8) A DATE IN THE SF CALENDAR. From Ray Bradbury‘s “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.  Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.  Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”  

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.  

1966 [By Cat Eldridge.] Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. is the Amicus film that premiered fifty-six years ago this evening. It was directed by Gordon Flemyng as written by Milton Subotsky, based off Terry Nation’s The Dalek Invasion of Earth for the TV show. It was the second such film done, the first being Dr. Who and the Daleks which was was based off Terry Nation’s The Daleks. It was not canon, nor has it been retroactively declared canon by the BBC.

Peter Cushing as Dr. Who and Roberta Tovey was Susan, his granddaughter. Bernard Cribbins appeared here as Tom Campbell. He appeared four times in the actual series. Despite this, the BBC explicitly note that that these films were not related to the series, nor any events here should reflect upon the series. Odd given that there was a Doctor Who there and his granddaughter, there was a TARDIS, there was Daleks and so forth.

Nation was paid five hundred pounds for three scripts with third being called The Chase but the second film drew so poorly that The Chase never got produced. 

And if you watched this one, you’ll have noticed the curious matter of the Doctor not being on-screen much of time. Cushing was seriously ill during shooting so they had to rewrite the script to remove much of his lines. 

Part of the funding came from a cereal company. The breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs to be precise and, their signs and products can be seen at various points in the film. Sugar Puffs ran a competition on its cereal packets to for its fans win a Dalek film prop, was allowed to feature the Daleks in its TV advertisements.  

The overall critical response at the time was that both films suffered greatly in comparison to the series itself. A typical comment was this one from The Times: “[T]he cast, headed by the long-suffering, much ill-used Peter Cushing, seem able, unsurprisingly, to drum up no conviction whatever in anything they are called to do.” It’s worth noting that was really made on the cheap by the BBC costing only three hundred thousand pounds. 

Tom Baker later criticized both films saying “There have been two Doctor Who films in the past, both rather poor… There are many dangers in transporting a television series onto the big screen… a lot of things that you could get away with on the small screen wouldn’t wash in the cinema.” 

It holds a poor rating of fifty-four percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. 

I have not seen either film. I’m curious to hear from those of you who have seen them as to what you think of them. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 5, 1891 Donald Kerr. Happy Hapgood in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars which certainly is one of the earliest such films. His only other genre appearances were in the Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man in uncredited roles. (Died 1977.)
  • Born August 5, 1929 Don Matheson. Best remembered for being Mark Wilson in Land of the Giants. He also had roles in Lost in Space (where he played in an alien in one episode and an android in another episode), Voyage to the Bottom of the SeaThe Alfred Hitchcock Hour, an Alice in Wonderland film and Dragonflight. (Died 2014.)
  • Born August 5, 1948 Larry Elmore, 74. His list of work includes illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons, Dragonlance, and his own comic strip series SnarfQuest. He is author of the book Reflections of Myth. He was nominated for Best Professional Artist at MidAmericCon II, has the Phoenix Award and has five Chesley Award nominations.
  • Born August 5, 1966 James Gunn, 56. Director, producer and screenwriter whose first film as director was Slither. Very silly film. He’s responsible for both Guardians of The Galaxy films, plus the forthcoming one. He executive produced both of the recent Avengers films, and he’s directing and writing the next Suicide Squad film. I am far fonder of the Guardians of The Galaxy films than I am of the Avengers films. 
  • Born August 5, 1972 Paolo Bacigalupi, 49. I remember the book group I was part of some years ago having a spirited debate over The Windup Girl (which won a Hugo at Aussiecon 4 in a tie with China Miéville’s The City & The City and a Nebula as well) over the believability of the central character. I think he did a better job with characters in his next novels, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, but he’s really not about characters anyways but ideas.  The Tangled Lands, a collection of his short works, won a World Fantasy Award. His novelette, “The People of Sand and Slag” got nominated at Interaction; “The Calorie Man” novelette at L.A. Con IV; “Yellow Card Man” novellette at Nippon 2007; and “The Gambler” novellette at Anticipation.
  • Born August 5, 1975 Iddo Goldberg, 47. Israel-born actor. Freddie Thorne in the Peaky Blinders series , Isaac Walton in supernatural Salem series and Bennett Knox in Snowpiercer series. He also had a recurring role on Westworld as Sebastian.  And under a lot of costuming, he played the Red Tornado in an episode, “Red Faced” of Supergirl.
  • Born August 5, 1980 JoSelle Vanderhooft, 42. Former Green Man reviewer with a single novel so far, Ebenezer, and several collections, Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories which the former were nominated for a Lambda Award. She also co-edited with Steve Berman, Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.

(11) IT’S IN THE CARDS. Gizmodo leads fans to “Relive X-Men Trading Card Nostalgia With This New Gallery”.

Jim Lee’s designs for the X-Men are burned into the minds of X-Fans like the Phoenix Force itself—whether you devoured comics, fell in love with the animated series, or, perhaps, just collected some of the iconic trading cards of the era. If you’re the latter, then we’ve got some very good news.

io9 has your exclusive look inside The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards: The Complete Series, Abrams ComicArts’ 30th anniversary celebration of Jim Lee’s iconic 105 Uncanny X-Men trading card set. Featuring an introduction by Bob Budiansky and a foreword by Ed Piskor, the book collects the backs and fronts of every card in the classic series, as well as insight from Marvel creators in interviews conducted by Budiansky, the original writer and editor on the trading card series…..

(12) KIPPLE IS UNDEFEATED. Robin Abcarian, the syndicated opinion writer, discovered a new word – but you probably know it already: “Why none of us can win against kipple”.

It’s coming up on two years since my father died at age 91. I miss him terribly, of course, but his death left me with a personal struggle I had not anticipated.

While you might understandably think his death left a void in my life, it did quite the opposite.

His death left me with so … much … stuff. He’d lived in the same house for more than 30 years, and even though he’d engaged in some half-hearted Swedish death cleaning — a decluttering aimed at easing burdens on one’s survivors – what he did, mostly, was just put things in boxes. Boxes I had to open to figure out what they contained after he died….

… I want to keep all of it, but I also want to pile it up and torch it.

Last week, I was bemoaning this dilemma when Anton, my future son-in-law, said, “Yeah, all the kipple.”

Kipple?

I thought it might be a Yiddish or German word, but Anton told me it was coined by the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in his 1968 dystopian novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” For those who need a plot refresher – or have not seen the 1982 movie “Blade Runner,” which was based on the novel – the story takes place in the future, after Earth has been mostly destroyed by a nuclear global conflict, World War Terminus. Most animal life has been extinguished. The population has emigrated to “off-world colonies.”

The word is used by the book’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter assigned to kill some uncannily human-like robots who have escaped involuntary servitude on Mars and returned to Earth.

“Kipple,” Deckard explains in the book, “is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homepage. [Dick’s incredibly prescient vision of a digital newspaper.] When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it.”….

(13) UNFORCED ERROR. “Scientist admits ‘space telescope image’ was actually a slice of chorizo” says CNN.

A French scientist has apologized after tweeting a photo of a slice of chorizo, claiming it was an image of a distant star taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Étienne Klein, a celebrated physicist and director at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, shared the image of the spicy Spanish sausage on Twitter last week, praising the “level of detail” it provided.

…Klein admitted later in a series of follow-up tweets that the image was, in fact, a close-up of a slice of chorizo taken against a black background.

“Well, when it’s cocktail hour, cognitive bias seem to find plenty to enjoy… Beware of it. According to contemporary cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere else other than on Earth”

After facing a backlash from members of the online community for the prank, he wrote: “In view of certain comments, I feel obliged to specify that this tweet showing an alleged picture of Proxima Centauri was a joke. Let’s learn to be wary of the arguments from positions of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images.”…

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [By Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Ms. Marvel Pitch Meeting,” the writer explains that Kamala Khan begins as a big fan of Captain Marvel and has all of our stuff. “I like it when we can sell fictional merch,” the producer explains.  He also likes a scene where Ms. Marvel suddenly has time travel and goes back to 1942 to save her grandmother’s life, because I think it’s a good idea for a character to be born.”

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Bill, John A Arkansawyer, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chris S.]

25 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/5/22 Welcome To The Scrolltel California. You Can Pixel Out Anytime But You Can Never Leave

  1. Writers getting paid… and you wonder why I’m desperately hoping that the DoJ wins the lawsuit, and prevents the merger of two of the remaining major publishers?

    In your b’day cmts for Paolo Bacigalupi, you mention “he’s really not about characters anyways but ideas.” I keep reading that these days, editors want character-driven stories, and I consider this a problem. Partly, it’s because I’m not writing those. “She Who Became The Sun” is character-driven… but by only wanting character-driven, you lose the stories where a protagonist happens to be in the right (or wrong) place, and how they respond to it… because they’re dealing with things that are not under their control.

  2. I’ve seen Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD, and the six-part story it was based on. It’s… not great. Strong casting, I’ll give it that, but it’s sort of colourful and fun and goofy where the original was dark and serious and emotionally complex (it’s the story where Susan falls for a resistance fighter and leaves the TARDIS crew – the first ever change in the line-up – and it makes a good deal of contrasting the budding relationship with the bleakness of the setting.) Perhaps the shift in tone is best illustrated by the Robomen slaves of the Daleks – you can see the film version, there in the black uniform and funky helmet, in the poster; in the movie, they move in almost comical union (there’s a very silly scene where Bernard Cribbins impersonates one of them) and they’re simply mindless quasi-fascist mooks. In the original, they’re gaunt, shambling, ragged figures with a huge metal contraption clamped to their heads, and the first scene is of one of them meeting his inevitable end, when he tears the control mechanism off in a fit of madness and drowns himself in the polluted waters of the Thames.

    So the much lighter tone of the film is at odds with the source material, and that’s never a good fit. Obviously, the film’s production values are a lot higher – three hundred thousand pounds would literally pay for over a hundred four-episode “Who” stories at the time, and the original show’s depiction of e.g. the Dalek spaceship is… pretty basic, let’s put it like that. (I’ve seen the film’s Dalek ship in at least one other film of the times, it’s a decent enough model, I’m sort of glad it got more use.) But the higher production values don’t make up for the toning-down of the script – stripped of the grimness and bleakness of the original, you can’t help but concentrate on the plot rather than the atmosphere, and the plot (in both versions) is extremely weak. I’m rather happy, in a way, that a film version of The Chase never happened, because that particular story is barely a story at all, just a series of almost unconnected scenes.

    Overall, it was a pleasant enough diversion on a wet Bank Holiday weekend, which I’m pretty sure is when I first saw it… but if you never see it, well, that’s not going to leave a terrible void in your life.

  3. (8) So we have four more years?

    (13) Someone said to me, that’s pizza…well, wrong, but they were clearly on the right track.

    I’ve been complaining off and on that I’m stuck in 2584. It has taken this long for it to penetrate that I’m stuck on July 23, 2584.

    Somebody rescue me?

  4. (12) Dick was indeed prescient about some things, but not enough to come up with the term “homepage” in the 1960s. The quote from Do Androids… mis-transcribes “homeopape,” another Dick coinage that also appears in Ubik and elsewhere.

  5. 9) My first Doctor was Peter Cushing. In the late 1960’s both Dr. Who and the Daleks and Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. were shown on the a regular basis on Channel 19, the then new UHF station in the Cincinnati area.

    I happen to own DVDs of these movies, mainly because they imbue me with an incredible sense of nostalgic for that era.

    I spent many a Saturday afternoon or evening watching them and they certainly prepared me for my formal introduction to the BBC series (and Tom Baker) courtesy of our local PBS station, which was among the first in the US to air Doctor Who.

    While I can understand that some may not feel much love for these films but personally, they mean a great deal to me as one of my introductions to the wider world of science fiction….

  6. The Peter Cushing movies weren’t made by the BBC, and Cushing isn’t playing a Timelord called the Doctor, he’s playing an eccentric human inventor called Doctor Who. So, not hard to see why they’re not part of Doctor Who’s main continuity.

  7. Greetings from PulpFest. Somebody bought a copy of Astounding with the famous “Slan” cover by Hubert Rogers… (Tor also reused that same cover art on the recent trade paperback reprint.) More shopping (and learning!) tomorrow.

  8. (9) I’m a long time fan of Doctor Who as a TV series but the few times the Cushing movies were on TV as a kid, I loved them. I think I prefer Dalek Invasion of Earth more of the two of them but also, they were really the only access to the pre-Pertwee era that was available for a long time.

  9. (9) I saw the Rifftrax version of one of the Cushing films and was entertained….

  10. @Lis Carey: “(13) Someone said to me, that’s pizza…well, wrong, but they were clearly on the right track.”

    When the star hits your eye
    Like a piece of a pie
    That’s chorizo

    What the world thinks a star
    Is not P. Centaur-
    I, that’s chorizo

  11. Re: “Marks’s Comments” “he’s really not about characters anyways but ideas.” I keep reading that these days, editors want character-driven stories, and I consider this a problem. Partly, it’s because I’m not writing those. “She Who Became The Sun” is character-driven… but by only wanting character-driven, you lose the stories where a protagonist happens to be in the right (or wrong) place, and how they respond to it… ”
    The classic book on SF being character driven versus idea driven is Leon Edel and Gordon Ray’s “Henry James and H.G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their debate on the Art of Fiction and their Quarrel” (Rupert Hart-Davis; First UK Printing edition (January 1, 1958). It’s available at Amazon and through many vendors at Bookfinder.com. Its a forgotten and lost classic that should be reissued in print or digitized, and if out of copyright, at some place like archive.org or Gutenberg, but definitely in every SF writer’s and English professor’s library…….

  12. @K
    Henry James did not write SF, but DID write some great ghost and fantasy stories, so I’d value his genre opinion greatly. goes off to look for book

  13. (12) The “junk” sense of kipple was not coined by PKD in 1968 for Androids, but existed since at least 1963 in the fanzine Ankus.

  14. Thanks for the link. Did you read it? (1) Ted Pauls didn’t invent the term “kipple”, and (2) he didn’t invent the definition picked up by Philip K. Dick.

    To remedy those vacancies in your knowledge, I call to the witness stand David Langford, who wrote “Have You Ever Kippled?” for his SFX column:

    In his final issue of Kipple, dated 1984, Pauls remarked that the name hadn’t originally meant anything – he’d borrowed it from the old joke that goes: “Do you like Kipling?” “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.” Which incidentally makes it an even more science-fictional word, because Rudyard Kipling wrote some notable SF stories.

    According to Pauls, a Kipple reader had mockingly redefined his title as “worthless junk that seems to multiply, as for example coat hangers, paper clips, etc.” The way Pauls remembered it, the culprit was another SF author who later became a respected editor: “Terry Carr, during a time when he and I were feuding over something utterly trivial.” After which: “Phil Dick (then a Kipple reader and correspondent of mine) picked it up and used it in that definition in a couple of his books.”

    Completing the circle that started with that ancient Kipling-kippled joke, Dick quoted the joke itself in his 1969 novel Galactic Pot-Healer.

  15. Completing the circle that started with that ancient Kipling-kippled joke, Dick quoted the joke itself in his 1969 novel Galactic Pot-Healer.

    Coincidentally, that is where I first read that joke. I thought it was very funny at the time and read more PKD for lighthearted japes like that…

  16. Whatever its actual origins, the Dickian sense of “kipple” is definitely the one I’ve encountered most often in fandom (though the old joke is also fairly widespread), and Dick is almost certainly the one most responsible for popularizing that sense.

    While I certainly support the writers in (4), I have to admit that I have much more mixed feelings about (5). Fanfic done for fun is one thing, but when it comes to profiting off of a work, that’s quite a different matter!

  17. 9) @Cat E. Yup, I have seen both Dalek Doctor Who films: both at the cinema when they first came out and also later on TV (and have the DVD of the first). I remember thinking when I first saw them how disappointed I was in the TARDIS interior. (Back then the TV show had a rather minimalist, white interior with just a central console and a wall-mounted TV monitor for exterior viewing. Other than the TV monitor, I liked that TARDIS design; the film’s design was to chaotic.)

    However, I enjoyed both films.

    I also recall the Sugar Puffs cereal promotion – one of the few times TV advertising worked as I badgered my parents to get the packet so as to enter the competition (and I hated Sugar Puffs).

    I never knew about Terry Nation’s unmade third film The Chase. Where did you dig that up…?

  18. Janathon C., Terry Nation and John Peel in The Official Doctor Who & The Daleks Book comment that they planned on making a third film, but the second film didn’t earn back its three hundred thousand pound budget. I mentioned that neither film was considered all that favorable when compared to the ongoing series.

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