Tag Archives: Coraline

Pixel Scroll 10/4/24 And When People Run In Pixels It’s A Very Very Mad Scroll

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(1) SFWA SECRETARY CANDIDATE WITHDRAWS. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association will open voting on October 9 for candidates to complete the terms of the president and secretary. SFWA today notified members the initial candidate for Secretary, Matthew Reardon aka JRH Lawless, has withdrawn from the race. There is a write-in for the position, Steven D. Brewer.

The office of President was vacated by the resignation of SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy on August 1. And when Interim President Chelsea Mueller resigned on August 15, Secretary Anthony W. Eichenlaub moved up to take her place.

Those chosen in the Special Election will serve the remainder of the current terms (until June 30, 2025).

(2) JUDY-LYNN DEL REY TRIBUTE ON PBS. The Renegades episode “Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal” premiered October 1 on PBS and the 12-minute video can be viewed at the link. The episode features interviews with: Shelly Shapiro, an editor and Judy-Lynn del Rey’s former assistant; Stephen Donaldson; filmmaker and dwarfism historian Aubrey Smalls; Toni Weisskopf; Lois McMaster Bujold; and Dennis Wise, Professor at the University of Arizona and a Del Rey scholar.

About the Episode

Judy-Lynn del Rey (1943-1986) was a New York sci-fi and fantasy editor and a woman with dwarfism who revolutionized the world of sci-fi editing with books from luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick.

After studying literature at Hunter College, she began her career in 1965 at the digest-size magazine Galaxy Science Fiction as an Office Assistant, rising up the ranks as Associate Editor in just four years. Following her numerous science fiction bestsellers for Ballantine Books, she started her own imprint, Del Rey Books, and brought along her husband Lester del Rey to revitalize the Ballantine science fiction publishing program. Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books was so dominant on the science fiction and fantasy market that they had 65 different titles reach a bestseller list. Del Rey brought us many of the classic sci-fi greats and was instrumental in obtaining the rights to publish novels based on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” selling 4.5 million copies months before the first movie was even released. Del Rey Books continues to be a publishing leader in science fiction to this day.

Renegades: Judy-Lynn del Rey explores the life and legacy of Judy-Lynn del Rey and the overarching impact of science fiction on societal norms: its ability to shape collective imagination, foster empathy and understanding, and reconfigure cultural thinking towards disability. People with disabilities, as with most historically targeted communities, are often combating inaccurate, harmful narratives about themselves….

(3) WEIRD TAXONOMY. Clayton Purdom tells LA Review of Books readers that there is such a thing as “Weird Nonfiction”.

…I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece.

Early examples include the essays and essay-like fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, Orson Welles’s exasperated, exuberant F for Fake (1973), and of course Marker’s otherworldly documentaries….

There are 20 things the author “knows for sure” about “weird nonfiction”. Here’s number one.

…Let’s try something different. More breaks, more air. Here are some things I know for sure about weird nonfiction:

1.  The earliest example is Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play “The War of the Worlds,” which famously inspired widespread real-world panic. When one broadcaster attempted to assure his listeners that there was no actual alien invasion, he was accused of being part of the conspiracy. Weird nonfiction is an infection….

(4) PRH PUSHING BACK AGAINST BOOK BANS. “Rosalie Stewart is the anti–book banning public policy manager at Penguin Random House” – Slate provides an introduction.

While it’s not unusual for other industries to dedicate staff to influencing or changing public policy, it’s virtually unheard of in the relatively sleepy world of book publishing. Rosalie Stewart, however, has just been hired as Penguin Random House’s senior public policy manager, a new position that will fight the recent explosion in book-banning campaigns at schools and public libraries. At present, for example, officials in Texas and Iowa have attempted to argue that the book collections held by schools and libraries constitute “government speech” and are therefore not protected by the First Amendment. This bid to redefine the nature of public libraries was rejected by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Iowa, but for Texas, the matter is being weighed by the notorious extremists on the “rogue” 5th Circuit. I spoke with Stewart recently about the battle before her….

… There have been two book-banning reports recently from the ALA and PEN America. The first said that book challenges are slowing down, and the second said that banning attempts have ramped up. Could you explain why there would be that difference?

My colleagues—my former colleagues, I should say—at ALA are very good at what they do, and they’re very smart. As a professional association, they just have a different focus in terms of what they’re counting. They’re focused on a very specific definition of a “book ban.” They only count book removals. But we know that this censorship is playing itself out in different ways. Not only are books being challenged, removed, and then put back on the shelf, but there is soft censorship. There’s a chilling effect in terms of the books that people are buying and teaching. I think that PEN America’s definition is a little more expansive and draws on a wider variety of sources. Censorship is not going down. Book banning is not fading away. That’s not what we’re hearing from people out there. That’s a major challenge: How do we fight back against this on such a diffuse battlefield? It’s happening at the state legislatures; it’s happening at the school boards; and it’s happening at the agency level….

 (4) PERHAPS YOU MIGHT TRY THE SOUP. [Item by James Bacon.] The first issue of a new zine emanating from the “North side inner-city gentrified Dublin catlands” entitled Perhaps you might try the Soup is now available to download at the link.  

Sole creator Pesto Jaguar has brought together an eclectic selection building on artistic experiences through other media and outlets. It is a very unusual zine, although an off the wall approach is not new, yet at the moment this feels different, but a mix of artists expression, satire, photographic imagery, inspired by comic culture, unorthodox yet authentic in an effort to share a set of unusual images that appeal to Pesto Jaguar and random thoughts. 

Pesto Jaguar can be found on Mastodon.

Details on Pesto are thin! It’s unclear if they are just a cat prancing on a keyboard filled with catnip or a cat person who digs Pasta, Electronic Music and Comics!

(6) THIS HAPPENS WHEN SURPLUSAGE HAS NOT BEEN ESCHEWED. Muse from the Orb kicks the pith out of “Late Stage RINGS OF POWER”.

…They say God stays in heaven because He fears what He’s created, and to that I say, cool. Two seasons of The Rings of Power have convinced me God should stay out of our business, actually; the people who write Rings of Power in a windowless conference room at Amazon can take it from here. As the inevitable corporate singularity spreads toward the horizon, and our human shells are hooked up to an endless feed of shows like this, I think that we could stand to marvel more at these vast images we have been given. My roommate asked, “Are the dwarves digging down to get to sunlight?” They were.

I’ve decided that we can’t judge Rings of Power on a human scale; perhaps not even on the scale of the aforementioned God. As a piece of art, it’s far too baffling. The deeper you stare, the more it starts to feel like some non-Euclidean artifact from a Lovecraft story staring back at you. What does this dialogue mean? Why did they switch to iambic pentameter for this speech? He’s just called “The Dark Wizard”? Last season, when Galadriel’s brother Finrod turned to her in the very first episode and said

“Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot? Because the stone sees only downward. The darkness of the water is vast and irresistible. The ship feels the darkness as well, striving moment by moment to master her and pull her under. But the ship has a secret. For unlike the stone, her gaze is not downward but up. Fixed upon the light that guides her, whispering of grander things than darkness ever knew”

my soul left my body and floated awhile against the border of some tessellated realm as far beyond our comprehension as computer circuits are to ants’. You know how inmates trapped in solitary confinement start to lose their notions of reality the longer they’re alone? Watching Rings of Power feels a bit like that. You’re witnessing a story that’s not actually series of human interactions but a single block of inorganic text, ventriloquized by humans who seem less real with every minute that passes. After binging a few episodes, one’s sense of place and time begins to slip….

(7) UNMENTIONABLE. The movie Coraline apparently made a lot of money this summer and will make some more on Halloween: “’Coraline’ Returns to Theaters for Halloween After Summer Rerelease”. You might not be surprised that the Variety article doesn’t contain Neil Gaiman’s name. For reasons.

… The beloved, stop-motion animated film from 2009 will return on Halloween for a limited-time engagement in newly remastered 3D and 2D formats.

If you feel like you just saw “Coraline” back in theaters, it’s not deja vu — you’re right. The film just had a successful summer rerelease for its 15th anniversary, where it made $53 million globally. Henry Selick’s film now stands at a lifetime haul of $185.7 million worldwide and is the highest-grossing stop-motion film in the U.S. It’s also the highest-grossing rerelease in the U.S. in the past 10 years and the highest-grossing of Fathom’s 20-year history. Attendees on Halloween will also get a sneak peek of Laika’s upcoming film “Wildwood.”…

(8) BARELY, I TELL YOU. “‘We were only slightly influenced by the Cantina music’: the underworld sounds of Star Wars Outlaws” – so they tell the Guardian.

Have you ever thought what walking into a sweaty, dusty club on one of Star Wars’ desert planets would sound like? About what plays on the radios in the casinos on those Las Vegas-like planets? What do the merchants and miscreants of Tatooine listen to when they’re not working the moisture farms or fending off Tusken Raiders? Pondering questions like that has been Cody Matthew Johnson’s life for the past few years. The composer and artist has flirted with video game music before, with credits on Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Bayonetta, and the cult indie Kurosawa-inspired side-scroller, Trek to Yomi. But for Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, he was tasked with making music for its seedy criminal underbelly.

(9) MAKANA YAMAMOTO Q&A. In The Bookeller: “Author Interviews – Makana Yamamoto. ‘Writing about my identity is a political statement’”.

“It’s ‘Ocean’s Eight’, but everybody’s a lesbian and it’s in space,” says Makana Yamamoto over video call from their home in Boston, Massachusetts, of their début novel Hammajang Luck. “That’s the joke answer. If I had to condense it down, it would be a heist novel about family, about home, culture and coming back home.”…

…They continued: “I had a lot of fear about it. I really wanted to do right by my community.” Début author Yamamoto is māhū, a Hawaiian term for people who embody the female and male spirit. Even if the book did not begin as a “political statement” about the Hawaiian diaspora, for Yamamoto the very act of writing is charged. “My identity is politicised. Even if I don’t want to be politicised, it’s just the nature of existing in this world as someone who is non-binary, who is māhū, who is not white, who is a lesbian. Writing about my identity is a political statement even if I don’t want it to be.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 4, 1923 – Charlton Heston. (Died 2008.) For the late 1960s and into the 1970’s, Charlton Heston was the face of SF cinema in a way that I think in terms of ubiquity across multiple movies and subgenres is matched only by Jeff Goldblum in this modern era. If there was a SFF movie to be made, Heston was likely to be in it. Planet of the Apes, and its sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The Omega Man. The Three and Four Musketeers, as the gold standard Cardinal Richelieu. Earthquake. And of course, perhaps the most iconic of these, Soylent Green. An ending which spawned a thousand memes, his hardbitten cop in an overcrowded New York City is a strength of character and role that is overshadowed by the even better Edward G Robinson in his last performance. 

And if you wanted to branch a bit out of genre, there are always his historicals – Ben Hur, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Ten Commandments, Khartoum, and Julius Caesar. I may have been violently opposed to his politics, but the man’s ability and charisma on screen remains for me, unquestioned. Even in the absolutely terrible movie Solar Crisis, which no one should watch for fear of losing SAN points, he is watchable in it, whenever he is on the screen.

Note: I picked a photo of him in Tombstone, where admittedly he only appeared in a handful of scenes as the famed rancher Henry Hooker, but oh wasn’t he magnificent! 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) WASCALLY WECRUIT. Heritage Auction’s October 18 – 22 The Art of Anime and Everything Cool…Volume V Signature® Auction, running October 18-22, includes such exotic treasures as Bugs Bunny’s WWII Marine Corps service record!

“Bugs Bunny RARE US Marine Corp Service-Record Book (Warner | Lot #17117” (Warner Brothers, 1942). In the ending for the 1943 cartoon Super-Rabbit, Bugs Bunny states he has some “important work to do” and marches off in a Marine uniform towards “Tokyo, Berlin, and Points East,” according to a sign he passes. With that in mind, here’s proof of his “enlistment” – an official Marine Corps Service-Record booklet numbered 000386 for “Bunny, Bugs” with the rank of Private, and below that, Sergeant. The booklet, specially prepared by the Leon Schlesinger Studio, is rubber-stamped “Sep 1 1942” and his date of birth is noted inside as April 1, 1938; the recruiting officer is Lt. Col. Newton B. Barkly from Dallas, Texas. Lt. Col. Barkely was a big cartoon fan and Bugs Bunny was his favorite; he personally contacted Schlesinger requesting art for his Marine unit, and this booklet is one of several things sent from Schlesinger’s studio. There’s a “photo” of Bugs holding a carrot on the inside front cover of this 4.125″ x 10″ tan-cover booklet. On the inside-back cover, the rabbit’s specialties are “Heckling and Wisecracking” while his favorite hobby is “heckling Elmer Fudd.” There are fingerprints but noted as “with gloves on.” Bugs really was officially inducted into the Corps as an official mascot, issued dogtags, and finally discharged at the end of World War II as a Master Sergeant. Wow! This museum-quality item has been kept with Lt. Col. Barkley’s family all this time and is fresh to the marketplace; there’s not another one in existence. Condition is Very Good with minor handling wear.

(13) NINTENDO MUSEUM. “Former Nintendo factory in Kyoto opens as nostalgia-fuelled gaming museum” and the Guardian peeks inside.

Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum.

The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards….

… Situated on the site of the video game company’s old manufacturing plant in Uji, a 20-minute train ride south of central Kyoto, the museum is expected to welcome up to 2,000 people a day. Tickets – which are allocated via a lottery system and cost 3,300 yen (£17) for an adult – are sold out three months in advance. When it opened in 1969, Nintendo’s Uji Ogura plant manufactured the toys and playing cards that were Nintendo’s money-makers at the time. After the dawn of the video game age in the 1970s, it operated as a customer service centre for console repairs until 2016. The building is far from Kyoto’s other tourist attractions: the suburban town surrounding it has been renovating its train station, preparing for a flood of visitors in Mario hats….

… Visitors are given 10 virtual coins per visit, used to spend on the interactive exhibits. An adjacent hanafuda workshop guides guests through making their own Japanese playing cards, above a cafe that serves custom burgers. Given Nintendo’s notorious secrecy about its creative process – and corporate secrets – it is perhaps unsurprising that there is no insight into how any of the games or consoles on display were made, or who played a part in their development. Only a small display of factory prototype controllers give the briefest peek behind the curtain….

(14) BASS ACKWARDS? Futurism says a “Weird New Quantum Experiment Sounds Suspiciously Like Time Travel”.

…But quantum physicists, who pride themselves on staring into the abyss and gleaning its spooky secrets, have just discovered another baffling phenomenon to make your mind melt: “negative time.”

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study covered by Scientific American, a team of researchers say they’ve observed photons exhibiting this bizarre temporal behavior as the result of what’s known as atomic excitation.

What essentially happened, as SciAm explains, is that when the photons were beamed into a cloud of atoms, they appeared to exit the medium before entering it. Trust us: we’re just as confused as you are.

“A negative time delay may seem paradoxical, but what it means is that if you built a ‘quantum’ clock to measure how much time atoms are spending in the excited state, the clock hand would, under certain circumstances, move backward rather than forward,” Josiah Sinclair from the University of Toronto, whose early experiments formed the foundation of the study, but wasn’t directly involved, told the magazine….

(15) LET’S TREAD BOLDLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, way back when (shhh 1970s) when I joined fandom there was a lot of sneering in some quarters of fandom at Trekkies and Trekkers, but I must admit to having something of a soft spot for Star Trek even if these days I find the sheer number of series a tad overwhelming.  To me it is a bit of fun with occasionally some episodes having great concepts, and I was particularly delighted when the opening credits would occasionally feature a script writer who was also a novelist whose books I also enjoyed.  As a scientist one has to suspend one’s disbelief and that can be more easily done if there is some brief technobabble that’s not too convoluted — I can be a forgiving soul.  Of course, one can be critical.  Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicist at Oxford University who has a weekly vlog, Dr. Becky.  This week she looks at the science of Star Trek: The Next Generation…

In this episode of Astrophysicist reacts we’re watching Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 6 “Where No One Has Gone Before” to pick out the science from the fiction in this sci-fi show. We’re chatting about faster than light speed travel, warp drives, special relativity including time dilation, and the idea of negative energy.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Not even Pitch Meeting can explain this movie,” says a commenter. Ryan George’s “Megalopolis Pitch Meeting”.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, James Bacon, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l.]

Pixel Scroll 3/19/24 Ocean’s Elevenses

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(1) GAIMAN COLLECTION AUCTION RESULTS. March 15 was “The Day Neil Gaiman Swapped His Original Comic Art, Comic Books and Collectibles for More Than $1 Million”.

[He offered] 125 prized pieces from his collection — everything from original comic artwork to signed books, a Coraline puppet used in the film to limited-edition sculptures, handmade Christmas stories given as gifts, to the awards he received. It was a day well spent: The completely sold-out Neil Gaiman Collection Comics & Comic Art Signature ® Auction, which drew more than 1,200 bidders worldwide, realized $1,029,392.

A portion of the auction’s proceeds will benefit The Hero Initiative, which provides medical and monetary assistance to veteran comics creators, writers and artists needing a helping hand. Some proceeds will also go to the Authors League Fund, which assists professional authors, journalists, critics, poets and dramatists in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income or other misfortunes.

Gaiman will also share some of the proceeds with the artists who made his imagination tangible enough to put on Bristol board.

“I love the idea of benefitting charities that look after authors who’ve fallen on hard times, that look after the artists and writers and creators of comics who’ve had hard times,” Gaiman told the packed auction gallery Thursday morning. “And I like the idea of normalizing the idea that we who do have art we bought for $50 a page or $100 a page that now sells for tens of thousands of dollars a page get into the idea of giving something back to the artists who originally drew it. That seems to me an important thing to do.”

This single page of art alone went for $132,000: “Dave Gibbons and John Higgins Watchmen #7 Story Page 16 Original Art”.

… Not far behind was the only piece of Sandman-related artwork Gaiman had ever purchased: Jean Giraud’s 1994 painting of Death of the Endless, sister of the titular Sandman whose epic tale spans the universe’s origin through the present day. This painting by the man called Moebius sparked a bidding war that drove its final price to $96,000. That was also the amount realized for John Totleben’s cover of Miracleman No. 16, the last issue written by Moore before Gaiman took the reins.

One of the auction’s most sought-after, fought-over pieces was among its smallest: an on-screen, camera-used puppet of Coraline in her orange polka-dot pajamas accompanied by her ever-present companion, The Cat — “fully posable actors,” as Gaiman explained. He told the audience that Coraline “has been in my bedroom in a glass case since 2009, and I had more qualms about letting her go than I did anything else in this entire auction. She’s there. She smiles at me. She’s special.”

It was so special that a bidding war broke out over Coraline, who eventually went to a new home for $72,000….

(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on March 13, 2024 where Moses Ose Utomi and Richard Butner read.

(3) EVIDENCE THAT SCHOOL TOSSED BOOKS WHICH WERE OBJECTED TO BY STAFF OR PARENTS. “Publishers Issue Letter to NYC DOE Over Discarded Books” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Candlewick Press, Charlesbridge Press, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the organization Authors Against Book Bans have issued a letter to the New York City Department of Education over reports that hundreds of books were discarded by a Staten Island elementary school on ideological grounds.

On March 11, Gothamist reported that hundreds of new books featuring characters of color and LGBTQ themes were found near the garbage at PS 55. Some of the books, pictured in the report, were marked by sticky notes that marked certain titles “not approved,” with reasons such as “Boy questions gender,” “teenage girls having a crush on another girl in class,” and “Witchcraft? Human skulls.”

The discarded books included copies of My Two Border Towns by David Bowle, illustrated by Erika Meza; Kenzy Kickstarts a Team (The Derby Daredevils #1) by Kit Rosewater, illustrated by Sophie Escabasse; Black Panther: The Young Prince by Ronald Smith; We Are Still Here: Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Frané Lessac; and Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd, illustrated by Christian Robinson.

Gothamist reporter Jessica Gold found that no formal challenge to the books had been raised through official channels and that “the removal of the books resulted from an objection raised by staff or parents.” The NYC DOE has reportedly announced it is conducting an investigation into the incident.

In response, a coalition of publishers whose books were discarded teamed with Authors Against Book Bans to pen a letter to New York City’s DOE over the report about the book removal, stating, “If true, such action amounts to unlawful censorship and violates authors’ and students’ First Amendment rights.”…

(4) SENDAK FELLOWS. “2024 Sendak Fellows Announced” – Publishers Weekly has the names.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has announced this year’s Sendak Fellows: Charlotte Ager, Rocío Araya, and Cozbi A. Cabrera.

The four-week fellowship will take place May 13 through June 9 at Milkwood Farm in South Kortright, N.Y., and comes with a prize of $5,000. During the residency, artists will focus on a project of their choosing, meet with visiting artists and professionals in the field, and explore Sendak’s house and archives in Ridgefield, Conn.

Originally from the Isle of Wight, Ager is a freelance illustrator based in London. Her clients have included the New York Times, Google Design, Penguin Random House, and Flying Eye Books. Araya is an illustrator from Bilbao, Spain, currently living in France. Rocío’s first English-language translation of her book Head in the Clouds will be published by Elsewhere Editions in 2024. And Cabrera is the author-illustrator of Me & Mama, which received a Coretta Scott King Honor and Caldecott Honor, and My Hair Is a Garden.

(5) NOT QUITE INFINITE COMBINATIONS. Den of Geek says “It’s Official: TV Shows Have Run Out of Titles”. (Fanzines have run into the same problem – how else to explain “File 770”?)

Back when it was all fields around here, TV show titles were in abundance. In the days when television used to be hand-stretched and sun-dried and made at a gentlemanly pace by artisanal methods, there were titles galore. Worzel Gummidge. Starsky and Hutch. Last of the Summer Wine. Distinct and descriptive titles milled around drinking holes, and all writers had to do was toss in a lasso and drag out a Sapphire & Steel or a Knight Rider.

But thanks to streaming, nowadays TV is made in windowless factories and injected with antibiotics and e-numbers. There can never be enough. Every streamer requires a chunky flow of television shows they can release all on the same day, not tell anybody about, and quickly delete for tax purposes before anybody watches them. And the first casualty (aside from the livelihoods of the writers, directors, crew, cast and the collective human spirit)? The titles.

The problem is, the glut has dried up the supply. Abstract nouns. Character names. Place names. Common phrases. “Fun” puns. Creepy lines from nursery rhymes for psychological thrillers. Every combination of words in the English language has already been used to name a TV show. ITV got lucky with Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, but it’s hardly a long-term solution.

Neither is it a uniquely new problem, but it is getting worse. Time was that two competing TV shows with the same title would be released a good many years apart, by which point, who could really remember the first one? When HBO brought out android interplanetary sci-fi Raised by Wolves in 2020, it was several years after the Channel 4 comedy Raised by Wolves set on a Wolverhampton council estate, and fairly difficult to confuse the two….

(6) DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME? “George Lucas Backs Bob Iger in Disney Proxy Fight with Nelson Peltz: ‘Creating Magic Is Not for Amateurs’” – a quote in The Hollywood Reporter.

… The Star Wars and Indiana Jones filmmaker is weighing in on The Walt Disney Company’s ongoing proxy fight with activist investors, and he is throwing his support firmly behind CEO Bob Iger and Disney’s board.

“Creating magic is not for amateurs. When I sold Lucasfilm just over a decade ago, I was delighted to become a Disney shareholder because of my long-time admiration for its iconic brand and Bob Iger’s leadership,” Lucas said in a statement Tuesday. “When Bob recently returned to the company during a difficult time, I was relieved. No one knows Disney better. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.”…

… Disney is facing a proxy fight against two activists: The corporate raider Nelson Peltz, and Blackwells Capital. Notably, Peltz has billions of dollars in shares pledged by Ike Perlmutter, who, like Lucas, sold his company (Marvel) to Disney and became a major shareholder. Perlmutter remained with Disney until being laid off last year….

(7) ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE YOUR LYIN’ EYES? Meanwhile, Variety reports Disney’s Star Wars cash register has rung up another sale: “’The Acolyte’ Trailer: New Star Wars Show Gets First Look on Disney+”.  

…Disney has released the trailer for its newest “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” which is set to stream on Disney+ June 4.

The series takes place 100 years before the franchise’s prequel trilogy during the High Republic era of the “Star Wars” universe, which is the furthest back in the timeline “Star Wars” has gone in a live-action production. An official logline for the series reveals, “An investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. (Died 2009.) I don’t how times I’ve seen the opening of The Prisoner series as it’s been separately shown from the episodes online pretty much since The Prisoner series first aired. Not sure in what context I watching it but that it was. It was, without doubt, one of the the best openings I’ve seen.

Then there was the series. Weird, thrilling, mysterious. Eminently watchable over and over and over again. Was it SF? Or was it a spy series set in the very near future? Who knew? And then there was Number Six, the never named intelligence agent played by Patrick McGoohan. He seemed destined to play this role.

He was an American-born Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. Now it turns out that The Prisoner was his creation. He was also one of the writers – there were five in fact — and he was one of four directors. In other words, he had his hand in every facet of the series and its sixteen episodes. 

Before he was that unnamed intelligence agent he was, and I’m not at all convinced that McGoohan meant this to be a coincidence, secret agent John Drake in the Danger Man espionage series. I’ve seen a few episodes, it’s well crafted.  

Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States for the revived series) was a British television series broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. (A neat bit of history here: Ian Fleming was brought in to work on series development, but left before that was complete. Apparently he didn’t like the way the secret service was to be portrayed.) 

After The Prisoner, McGoohan’s next genre endeavor was as the narrator of Journey into Darkness is a British television horror film stitching together two episodes derived from late sixties anthology television series Journey to the Unknown.

We are now leaving genre and headed for, well the Colombo series. Why so? Because he was good friends with Peter Falk and directed five episodes of the series, four of which he appeared in, winning two Emmys in the process. McGoohan was involved with the series in some way from 1974 to 2000. 

He was said that his first appearance on Columbo was probably his favorite American role. He had top billing as Col. Lyle C. Rum, fired from a military academy, in “By Dawn’s Early Light”, one of the  Colombo films that preceded the series.

His daughter Catherine McGoohan appeared with him in the episode “Ashes To Ashes” The other two Columbo episodes in which he appeared are “Identity Crisis” and “Agenda For Murder”.  

Yes, he reprised his role as Number Six for The Simpsons in “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”.  Homer Simpson fakes a news story to make his website more popular, and he wakes up in a prison that is a holiday resort. As Number Five, he meets Number Six. 

McGoohan’s last movie role was as the voice of Billy Bones in the animated Treasure Planet.

He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for The Prisoner.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On last night’s Jeopardy! episode, the Double Jeopardy round had a category, “Horrors!”

$1200: This horror master turned director to translate his own novella “The Hellhound Heart” to the screen as “Hellraiser”

Yogesh Raut knew this was Clive Barker.

$1600: H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the “U”s in the name of this “hellish entity” should sound “about like that in ‘full’ “

Ben Chan stumbled over the pronunciation a bit but gave “Cthulhu”.

$2000 – Daily Double. Yogesh: “I’ve wanted to say this ever since I was a child. Alex, I’ll make it a true Daily Double.” His bet: $15,200.

The title of this 1962 Ray Bradbury novel is a Shakespeare line that rhymes with “By the pricking of my thumbs”.

Very unsurprisingly, Yogesh got this right, parlaying this into a runaway win for the round.

$800: His Christmas ghost story “The Haunted Man” sold 18,000 copies on its first day of publication in 1848

Yogesh picked it as Dickens.

$400: Catriona Ward’s “The Last House on Needless Street” is partly narrated by Olivia, one of these animals, & that can’t be good luck

Troy Meyer tried, “What is a pig?”

Yogesh said, “What’s a cat?” and on prompting added “black” and was scored right.

Catriona Ward squeed about being a clue.

(11) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. “Researchers Name Ancient Species of Giant Turtle After a Universe-Vomiting Stephen King Character” – IGN unravels the references.

Researchers have named a newly discovered species of giant prehistoric turtle after a universe-creating character that features in Stephen King’s novel It, alongside the Dark Tower series of books.

The monstrous armoured reptile was thought to have lived between 40,000 to 9,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene period, during which time it may have lived alongside and potentially been hunted as a source of food by early humans in the Amazon….

…The fossil’s gigantic proportions lead the scientists to name the species Peltocephalus Maturin, in reference to the fictional, god-like turtle Maturin, which vomited out the universe that serves as the setting for Stephen King’s novel It. The benevolent turtle also appears as one of the guardians of the beams featured in King’s eight-part Dark Tower book series, which, like It, has been adapted into a live-action movie, though perhaps the less said about that the better.

As noted in the paper published in the scientific journal Biology Letters – and by the author himself on X after reading the news – King’s character was itself named in reference to the fictional doctor Stephen Maturin, who, in the course of Patrick O’Brian’s seagoing novel H.M.S. Surprise, names a giant tortoise….

(12) LIFE IS SHORT, ART IS LONG. ShortCon2024, “the Premiere Conference for Short Crime Fiction Writers”, takes place Saturday, June 22, and Michael Bracken and Brendan DuBois – familiar around here – are among the presenters.

Join acclaimed crime fiction professionals for an immersive, one-day event and learn how to write short crime fiction, get your stories published, and develop and sustain a long-term career writing short. 

(13) THUMBS UP. Camestros Felapton gives us his eyewitness account in “Review: Zombie the Musical”.

… The show starts off with the hapless cast rehearsing their production of “It’s a Musical! (The Musical!)” with requisite sailors singing about the wonders of New York. In reality, the cast is a mix of a not-so-bright leading man whose acting career is magically failing upwards, a leading woman sick of playing two-dimensional characters, an ageing actress whose career is effectively over and a perpetual understudy with genuine talent but no chance of ever becoming a professional. Outside it is Sydney 1999 and people are worried about Y2K and excited about the Olympics coming in 2000. The tone is set with broad parodies about musicals and the sexism of the theatre industry (especially circa the 1990s).

The world of musicals begins breaking down when the leading man quits and the news on the radio warns of a rapidly spreading infection. Will there even be an audience for their opening night?…

Here’s a “sneak preview” from last fall.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]