Rob Pincombe is a prolific television writer, recovering comedian and sometime comic artist/storyboard artist who just wasn't satisfied with a single blog.
He writes about sci-fi and fandom at rebelalert.com, Canadian comics at comicanuck.com, and shares thoughts and insights on writing at starkravingadventure.com
Though our first stop on our Sci-Fi World Tour, Australia's Phoenix 5, has yet to be collected on DVD, you can check a small review of ithereatBlack Hole DVD Reviews. They also have areviewof the long-awaited DVD release of a show created in the next stop of our tour, Germany! Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol), the fantastic adventures of the Spaceship Orion is a show I was turned on to a year or two ago. Now this is a series with production value and truly happening sixties design!
What seems like a fairy tale today may be reality tomorrow.Here we have a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow.There are no more national states, only mankind and her colonies in outer space.We settle on stars far-off, the bottom of the sea is developed as living place.With what are today unimaginable speeds, the starships of tomorrow transverse the Milky Way.One of this starships is the ORION,a little piece in the giant security system which protects the Earth from outer space threats.Let's accompany the ORION and her crew at their patrols-service on the edge of infinity...
If you're anything at all like me you're wiping up drool with your sleeve right now. Sadly, all that production value came at too steep a cost and only seven adventures were ever filmed. But that makes these few episodes that did get made all the more precious!If you're seeing spans of black on this post, its because my embedded Youtube vids are taking a while to load lately. Rest assured, patience will be rewarded.
A terrific taste of this amazing looking series is contained in this Youtube Remix of the music.
Did you catch the futuristic dancing? Want more? How could you not? It's too awesome to waste words on. We can thank Youtube once again for this little piece of future joy.
Oh the dancing! That's how people thought dance clubs of the future would look. Prophetic, huh? It turns out they were right! Here's a quick tour of Orion, a German club based on the series.
Starlight Casino, the extensive German home of Raumpatrouille fandom, has a page in English for the uninitiated. Click the banner below to visit. And yes, those are giant goldfish swimming above the club.
The German home page for the Starlight Casino ishere. You can also find more Raumpatrouille awesomenesshere, andhere, and you can buy the soundtrackhereor download ithere. Where Phoenix 5 was sunk by a low budget and being aired against adult sci-fi shows like Star Trek instead of the kid shows it was designed to compete with.
Leave it to the Germans to out-cool the Aussies. Then again, they co-producedStar Maidens with Great Britain so perhaps we shouldn't give them a free just yet. So let's program our auto-controls for the European system and pay a little visit to an unlikely combination of English and German sensibilities.
An Imperial informant has broughtMicheal Pinto'sFanboy.com to our attention. This spy droid is proving to be a reliable, if extremely opinionated, source for dang funny and fascinating intel from the world of sci-fi and animation going back back decades. He writes well too and I suspect, can fluently make funny, snarky comments in over six million intergalactic languages.
Inspired by his recent intel on those sci-fi loving Australians, we have decided to start our Sci-Fi World Tour of unique sci-fi shows whether incredible and unfortunate.
Take three attractive Aussie actors, dress them up in psuedo-Star Trek uniforms, team them with a walking garbage can, stuff them onto a bridge set so tiny they have to face away from the camera and shuffle just to get by each other (The bridge doors opens up to reveal a long hall set. Why not just use the entire space for the bridge so they breathe?), toss in a jazzy, 70's theme with shots of our heroes running and jumping and then stop everything with a script so slow it creates it's own black hole event horizon, dragging all time in the episode to a slow crawl wherein every minutes feels like an eternity, and you've got...
...Phoenix Five!
The fatherly Captain Roke (that is, if your father was a dick who'd let you blithely walk into near-certain death because you've "got to learn!") presides over a crew consisting of the hot-headed and arrogant (but extremely polite) Ensign Adam Hargreaves, the lovely, sensible (and therefore generally ignored) Cadet Tina Kulbrick and a lumbering, robotic cross between a garbage can and a popcorn popper named Karl (Karl?!) who speaks like a tape recorder with dead batteries.
Truth is, the show seems rather charming, though the entertainment value is a little hard to spot from the episode Pinto found on Youtube and re-posted here. But the opening credits do rock in a groovy kind of way! I dare not to frug in your bell-bottoms on your shag carpet as they play! This definitely goes on my all-night dance party mix CD! If you see spans of black below it means the Youtube vids I've attached are taking their time loading. Give it a minute. It's worth it.
A terrific write-up on Phoenix 5 and its immediate predecessors, The Interpretaris and Vega 4 can be found hereatClassicAustralianTV.com. That's where I got all these pics. They have a list of episodes and synopsis'herealong with more photos.
Can we get a shout out for the all the Space Ladies in the house?!
While the budgetary restrictions are evident in the low-fi special effects they do seem to have had a great time with the costumes and make-up effects. Some real imagination is displayed in aliens like the gents below.
I dub thee, Mr. Aspar Gus, Artie Choke, and Dr. Blueberry.
Though Phoenix 5 has yet to be collected on DVD, you can check a small review of ithereatBlack Hole DVD Reviews.
This show should not be confused with Manny Coto's (Tales From The Crypt, Outer Limits, Star Trek Enterprise, 24) Odyssey 5series on Showtime starring Peter Weller. According to Sci-Fi Wireby way ofAkasha's Guide to Sci-Fi and Horroron the Net, it was Showtime's second highest rated series at the time and their number one show in the male demographic and with adults 25-54. Showtime was so excited buy the seriess performance it didn't bother renewing it for a second season.
There's something a sci-fi show that's so thoroughly a product of its time, budget and cricumstances that you can't help but fall in love with it despite the cheese factor. Phoenix 5 has officially inspired me to take a Round the World tour of unlikely sci-fi shows from across the Globe, with a healthy serving of the old fromage!
Round and round we'll go and where we'll stop not even our astromech droid knows!
While that horrified-yet-slightly-intrigued look crosses your face, I should tell you it's a comedy film festival with a theme of sex and porn. You won't find a lot of real porn there.. mainly because the real stuff is boring (Which is why I can only watch about 17 hours of real porn in one sitting).
So, in addition to working on a couple of shorts for his festival and consolidating the two-country lives of my wife and myself down to one country at last, I will am expecting some interruptions in your regular Rebel Alert feed for the next month.
But Darryl has come through again with a solution; several great Star Wars links. That means I'm going to let other people do my work for me while I double-back in my X-wing for a run at the Death Star's exhaust port trench... and deal with movers.
The real key to all this is the regular sound Mike kept with the footage. People talking about their mundane stuff or demonstrating heatedly over China's human rights records really completes the subtle "sell". It also confirms my long-held suspicion that China has indeed become a puppet nation under Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious.
A meeting was held aboard the lead Star Destroyer between Admiral Piett, Lord Darth Vader and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in which Mr. Schwarzenegger ripped off his shirt, drew his ancient sword and assured the invaders that "By Crom," he would "crush his enemies, see them driven before him and hear the lamentations of their women."
A sweep of Vader's lightsaber solved the "riddle" of the governor's steel. The Sith Lord then held out his fist as the governor wondered "what the hell he was". Upon his release from Vader's Force-powered grip, California's fearless leader, rubbed his swollen neck, assuring everyone it was "not a tumour".
The Imperial commanders dictated their terms for California's surrender but it ended in a stalemate. After beating up and stealing the clothes from an Imperial lackey, the governor donned sunglasses and countered Vader's Jedi Mind Tricks by analyzing, synthesizing and duplicating Piett's voice. As Schwarzenegger was escorted out, his computer eyes sized up the defenses of the Piett's Star Destroyer and he defiantly vowed over his shoulder that he would "be back."
Moments later the governor drove a Ford Bronco through the wall of Piett's office. Unfortunately, the spectacular stunt also damaged the Bronco's brakes, causing the bodybuilder turned action hero turned governor turned action hero to drive through the port window and plummet into the San Francisco Bay.
Reportedly, the Admiral's only response was, "Hasta la vista, bantha."
Eyewitnesses later spotted the governor walking calmly out of the water at nearby Baker Beach, a single eye glowing with a menacing red light red.
Welcome to the rebellion. With Spike TV in the US becoming the 24 hour Star Wars channel lately, I've had the extended opportunity to have the revised, revamped and recycled trilogy prequel and the original three movies playing as I sat with my mucho delayed tax calculations.
With the dialogue failing to hold my attention and the actors so awestruck by being in a Star Wars movie they fail to bring personality to their roles (too much reverence and not enough irreverence), I had a chance to pay closer attention to the background scenery and design. Man, the designers really are the big stars on display.
One smart thing George Lucas did from the very start was to treat most of the technology like it's always existed. A movie set in L.A. wouldn't spend any time setting up what a phone is or how it works, they'd just use the dang thing and anyone who had never seen a phone would figure it out. "Oh, that thingie allows these two people to communicate."
But the more I watch the films the more I realize how technology doesn't make the lives of the people in his universe any better. It seems to take all the technology they can muster to hold a their savage natural world at bay.
The icy cold of Hoth is barely survivable. In fact, technology fails Luke completely in The Empire Strikes Back. Han must use his wits and survival skills to create a warm sleeping bag out of a fallen tauntaun.
Degobah plays havoc with Luke's X-Wing, the wild waters of Kamino are a deadly danger Obi-Wan must avoid at all costs, the burning volcanic sands of Mustafar claimed Anakin Skywalker's humanity (with the help of a little light saber chop chop, courtesy of his mentor, Obi Wan). And the seat of the Old Republic's Galactic Senate, Corsucant has conquered and obliterated any hint of nature and become an endless, crowded urban jungle.
But is life there better because of it? It doesn't seem so. Flying cars fill the skies, sin dens line the streets. It is as inhospitable as Geonosis has become, with its craggy craters and the run from it's droid factory. Perhaps only the serene and cheery Dexter Jexter of Coco Town's Dex's Diner finds this city planet preferable when compared to the inhospitable environments he has seen.
The only planets where there is any kind of harmony with the natural world are those whose technology hasn't encroached. Planets where the natural is respected and treated with reverence (now that's the place for reveerence). The Wookies and Ewoks live in harmony with their world as do the inhabitants of Naboo. Not coincidentally, the beings of these worlds seem to be the most peaceful and balanced creatures we see in the trilogies.
Are the designers sending a not so subtle message about rampant technology? Unfettered, technology provides few answers and often creates more problems; pollution, waste and destruction of natural environments being only the most obvious ones. Is this a quiet plea for a more measured and peaceful use of science? Perhaps.
More likely such decisions stemmed from creating as dramatic a backdrop to the main action as possible. Seeing hints of the natural and scientific worlds wrestling for domination adds to the compelling, human drama in the foreground. And when the human drama is played out with wooden dialogue, awkward, inconsistent character arcs and perfunctory direction, I'll take my drama anywhere I can find it.
