Temple Talysman

I was posting some idle speculation to a forum about what Doctor Who would have looked like if it had been made by an American company, but back in the '60s or thereabouts. And it might not have looked too bad:

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka would have made a great Doctor. Or, going earlier, maybe Rex Reason or Michael Rennie. Vincent Price would have been The Master. The interior shots of the TARDIS would resemble the command deck of the saucer in This Island Earth plus the Krell power core from Forbidden Planet. Cybermen would have looked more like Gort. The Daleks would still be conical, but the dome would be transparent and would contain the Martian leader from Invaders from Mars.

And, of course, there'd have to be an interocitor somewhere.

And then it hit me: The Doctor is an atomic-age horror scientist-hero, like Rex Reason, although he has a touch of the atomic-age smug alien, like Michael Rennie or Exeter (This Island Earth.) The thematic core of the series expresses the same values as the scientist-hero. Solving problems with a mix of genius and feeling. Definitely the central figure, but enlisting the aid of the government or military when possible, as long as they are willing to fight the menace with some measure of morality. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers would have made a perfect Doctor Who story. So would a lot of atomic-age-horror movies.

After reading The Moon Pool, I decided to read Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, which served as partial inspiration for The Moon Pool. Narrator travels underground, finds an advanced society. The book is half the length of The Moon Pool, but took a lot longer to read; it's tough slogging, perhaps because of the legendary Bulwer-Lytton writing style, although I haven't read any other Bulwer-Lytton books to compare. It's slow reading mostly because it's not an adventure story, like Merritt's book; it's from the tradition of social and political commentary disguised as a travel tale. I think his intent was to focus on gender and class questions, but because his underground race has access to a near-magical force known as vril, and suggests at the end that the advanced race might be expanding into the upper world next (hence, the "Coming" Race,) the book became a legend in the occult and crackpot communities. Richard Shaver thought the book was a true story and wound up spinning his own, similar tale about the subterranean Dero. Nazis thought the subterraneans were Aryans and wanted to communicate with them. Conspiracy theorists thought the Nazis succeeded.

The Coming Race is also famous for inventing the phrase "the almighty dollar". And perhaps should be famous for referring to some people as "twats". In 1871! And he didn't think it was part of a nun's habit! Scandal!

The break-out character in New Girl?

Schmidt.

The fact that he's high-strung and a douche makes him an endless source of great humor. Especially since he's a harmless douche, and is aware of his own douche-dom. He's even willing to put money in the Douche Jar anytime he does something douche-like. But he won't change, 'cause he likes the way he is.

I just finished reading The Moon Pool (1919) by A. Merritt. People say that this influence Lovecraft and the TV series "Lost", and they are right. I found out also that it influenced The Mole People (1956). I'll explain more in a somewhat spoilery fashion behind a cut.

( The Secrets of the Moon Pool )

I do recommend The Moon Pool, which is a pretty good read even with its dated language. I feel like it influenced a lot of other fantasy/adventure stories beyond Lovecraft and "Lost".

I was terrified when he showed up, but I guess he wasn't so tough.

I tend to watch a lot of fantasy/sci-fi/horror on TV, but a lot of stuff I used to watch is now either finished or only available on channels I no longer get. So I've been scraping around for new TV series that will fit into my preferred niche -- and the pickings are slim.

Some of them just seem to be scheduled wrong, so I rarely watch them. Terra Nova is one of those, as is Once Upon a Time. At least, it's more charitable to say "they're in the wrong time schedule" than to admit that I watched a couple episodes of Terra Nova and couldn't muster up any interest. Same applies to the modern-day segments of Once Upon a Time, although I've watched a bit more of that because the fairytale segments are more interesting. The storyline split across two time periods is annoying, badly handled, and obviously done because they were afraid audiences wouldn't buy a straight fairytale storyline. Cowards.

Grimm is similar to Once Upon a Time in that the people in charge obviously want to tap into the horror fanbase, similar to OUaT's tapping into the magic fanbase, but the producers were unwilling to commit fully. It winds up looking like a very toned down Buffy, Angel, or Supernatural. The hero's abilities are minimal and he doesn't really exploit them to any degree; he's really just a cop to hunts criminals who are secretly subhuman, but only he can tell. Stories are kind of ho-hum as a result, but I'm still sticking with it.

Person of Interest, in the same way, is borderline science fiction/superhero. No costumes, no powers, no gadgets, just an ex-CIA dude and a guy who built a terrorism- and crime-predicting computer for the government. Thus, the tech is just a little itty bit more advanced than reality. It's actually the more interesting of the four shows, but I still feel cheated, even though it has "Ben" from Lost and he's doing a pretty good job in a paranoid good-guy role.

Those are the shows that started with the fall season, but there have been two new mid-season replacements: Alcatraz and The River. Both are further along on the fantastic motif scale than the previous four: Alcatraz has the backstory that everyone on the island when the prison closed actually disappeared, and now they're coming back, without any signs of age. It's also got a Lost alumnus ("Hurley".) But despite the backstory and hints of future mystery-tinged with sci-fi, the storyline is basically Brimstone without demonic powers. It's kind of early to tell (only saw two episodes,) but The River has a pretty decent bundle of supernatural horror ideas, but the presentation (all done as a fake cinema verité) is really pretty lame, as is every single bit of action or dialogue that the main characters are involved in.

Which is sad, because it seems to be the only new "fantasy" series that is willing to commit to a fantastic premise.

It looks like *everyone* forgot about Rabbit Hole Day. Usually, it's just me.

I forgot to mention I've been watching New Girl, the sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel. The commercials didn't look all that funny, nor did the clips I saw on Ferguson, plus as I've reported here, I've found my Zooey Deschanel experiences to be uneven (one movie I can't remember in any detail, two bad movies, one good movie, one good job in an otherwise bad movie.) So I wasn't planning to watch it. I blame gmdreiafor changing my mind.

The show was funnier than its previews. It's got this weird simultaneously wacky and low-key quality. For example, the cat that was raised by birds. There are some really contrived bits; they're obviously planning this as a long-term "boy (Nick) and girl (Jess) meet cute" story. So, like all sitcoms in the last thirty years with this kind of plot line, they had a "see each other naked by accident" episode.

But despite the failings, I like it quite a bit. If only I could remember to watch it...

I should also talk about the current crop of borderline sci-fi shows, but I'll save that for later.

So, quite by accident, I watched another M. Night Shyamalan movie, "The Village". I'd heard rumors about this movie, but thought at first that maybe they were exaggerated; the opening of the movie had a bunch of quick scene changes, which might seem jumpy to some (a couple people told me it felt really disjointed.) But I kind of liked it, even if the dialogue was a little stilted. It was a quick way to fill you in on the backstory of what's going on.

But as the movie wore on (and wear it did,) the stilted dialogue and ridiculous blocking became much more annoying. I don't know why Shyamalan love to set up shots of the back of people's heads, or long shots of people having intimate dialogue. But more importantly, "The Village" is one of those dumb mysteries that depends on keeping the audience in the dark, rather than the characters. That's not really a mystery; it requires characters to speak to each other in weird ways that hides information they all know, but we don't. A real mystery is about a character discovering the truth, which sometimes the audience discovers well in advance; the tension comes from our wondering when the character will find the truth, and how the character will deal with that.

In "The Village", there's only one moment where a character discovers a truth that the rest of the characters know, and that moment of discovery is artificially shifted to be revealed later... and the character never discovers the full truth. The movie does not care if the character ever learns the full truth. It's all meant as a rather stupid allegory.

So, the movie looked promising (very un-Shyamalanian) at the beginning, but quickly rose to disappoint me.

I think I said something once a long while ago about wishing I could see some Jerry Lewis movies; I hadn't seen any for maybe 25 to 30 years. There were a couple Jerry Lewis movies available on demand, so I watched 'em. Two I'd seen when I was a kid: "The Geisha Boy" and "The Nutty Professor". Two others are frequently cited as works of genius: "The Bellboy" and "The Errand Boy". I also saw "The Ladies Man", which I'd never heard of. I also watched that documentary about Lewis that just came out.

Jerry Lewis is an overhyped unsung genius. That is, most people seem to treat him as a joke or rarely talk about him at all, while the few who do talk about his movies make too big a deal about how great he is. I like some of what he does. I think individual bits he does can be extremely funny, because (and I just realized this in the last few weeks) he's a perfect mimic. Not just a mimic of voices or facial expressions or body posture, but of seemingly *everything*, which is a pretty rare talent, indeed.

But those Lewis movies I watched all share this in common: they're really just individual funny bits strung together. Several of the bits in "The Geisha Boy" and "The Nutty Professor" don't really go anywhere in terms of overall plot, and the overall plot of either movie isn't all that great, anyways. Some places in between funny bits drag a little, and that's even more true of "The Bellboy" and "The Errand Boy", which I didn't think were all that worthy as "great works of cinema"; they were quick pics filmed to fill studio schedules, and they only work because you can watch Jerry Lewis clown around in a bunch of unrelated bits and it will still make you chuckle, even laugh out loud in a couple places. I think when I get a chance to watch other Lewis movies I saw as a kid ("At War With The Army", "That's My Boy", "Living It Up", "The Delicate Delinquent", "Cinderfella", "The Family Jewels", "Boeing Boeing", "Three On A Couch") I'll notice that they're much the same. 

Summary: Jerry Lewis is funny, Jerry Lewis movies are enjoyable; but these movies, at least, aren't great movies. They're "light-hearted romps".

jwgh is running a little poll about the past tense of "plead": is it "plead" (pronounced and sometimes spelled "pled",) or is it "pleaded"? And is "pleaded" becoming more common?

I'm not really a linguist, but I decided to run a little experiment using the Google Books Ngram viewer. This lets you chart the frequency of particular words or combinations of words over a period of a couple centuries in published books. First, I tested "pled" versus "pleaded".


It looks like "pleaded" is decreasing in popularity, but it has always been way above "pled". This may be because "pled" is a low-frequency spelling, so I had to figure out a way to test the past participle spelled as "plead". I figured "has plead" vs. "has pleaded" might do the job:

A noticeable difference between "pled" and "has plead", but still very low frequency. It looks like "plead" as a past participle has always been the less common form. But I don't get why the frequency of "pleaded" is dropping.

(Addition: I did a check on "has pled" vs."has plead", too, to see which was the preferred form. It's gone back and forth every few decades, it turns out...)