Quest for an audience: Final nail in the social media coffin?

Interesting article over at Publisher's Weekly by Jennifer McCartney about best-selling author Victorine E. Lieske.

Some take-aways:

Lieske says a key ingredient to success is to simply write a story that people want to buy. “You’d be surprised at how many writers don’t understand why their part science fiction, part women’s fiction, part space opera, part paranormal romance, part dog mystery based loosely on their life story isn’t a bestseller,” she says.

And…

She examined her marketing and publicity efforts but remained confused. Sales were steady and didn’t jump when she posted a blog or bought an ad. So what was influencing people to buy her book? Lieske says she got an email from a woman that helped solved the mystery. “She said, ‘Amazon recommended your book to me, and I really enjoyed it.’” At that point, Lieske realized that it was not her tireless marketing efforts that had resulted in more sales. “I was doing all this work, blogging, and posting on forums, and making book trailers, and all these things that weren’t reaching people,” she says. “But Amazon could reach hundreds of people each day.” She decided that the key to a book’s success must happen before the book is published—a combination of writing, story line, cover design, blurb, and price.

In other words, all the time and effort sunk into blogging, twittering, etc. is exactly that: sunk.

Funny, I was just thinking of making a book trailer.

Maybe not.

What about blogging? It's kinda fun trying to write reviews. It's a very different kind of writing, compared to a novel, say, but it really doesn't help much of anything. You'd have to blog for years and years, on a very specific topic, to get any traction. I've tried to focus on Sci-fi and Post-Apocalyptic, but that's an area saturated with online material.

I may still write a review of Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse though. He's into the whole gritty, absurdist post-apocalyptic thang, complete with civilization saving strip clubs.

Damn, I thought I was original with my satire.

Google Communities are pretty touchy, so that's not a very viable way to connect with people. I'm contemplating starting one myself, but then, I imagine that'd just be another time sink, and there's probably good Wild West reasons for Communities to be so quick to delete and ban.

No easy answers, other than starting 5 years ago instead of now.

And I'll bet others be saying that in five years...

Doctor Who: The Witch's Familiar

Wanted to like it. I really did. The episode riffs off of one of the best episodes of the original series, and promised to be a strong chaser.

There’s a lot of sound and fury, and then it just doesn’t bother to deliver.

Sorry.

First, the good stuff:

I liked the explanation of the teleportation fake-out that Missy pulled, and the flashback to an earlier, untold Doctor story. That was fun.

The episode looks great. Really freakin’ amazing (with a few exceptions. See below). The Dalek control room is fabulously realized, and looks like a cross between the 1960s Andy Warholesque pop art Dalek feature film sets and those of Ken Adams.

The CGI exteriors of Dalek City rock, and are embellished with tiny little flying Daleks zipping about willy nilly, making for a nice FX cherry top. The show has come a long way from the closet of styrofoam and cardboard. Well. A lot is still probably made with those materials, they just hide it better.

Speaking of which, the required hallways are appropriately repetitive looking. Really evoke an earlier era, especially the retro Dalek doors. Who knows? They may catch on.

Missy (Michelle Gomez) is crazy wonderful. She dominates every scene she’s in the way Kramer kicks ass in karate class; I can’t take my filthy eyes off her. She makes the Doctor, Clara, and even our dear desultory Davros fade into the scenery. She’s got the best material to work with, the most outrageous lines, the loosest rules, the most idiosyncratic costume, and she pushes it all to the limit of what’s acceptable in a former children’s tea time show.

Gomez’s acting choices here are freakin' flawless.

The way she determined the depth of the pit… brilliant.

Her final effort to get Clara erased was the pinnacle of her performance, and it at least gave Clara something to do, even if ineffectually and while imprisoned in a can.

The concept for the episode, having the Doctor trying to rescue a child only to discover it is his greatest enemy, is a wonderful one, and has a direct link back to Genesis of the Dalek and a quote by the Doctor himself. What a cracker idea to base a story on! So many places it could go. Such potential!

But it isn’t realized. And that’s a shame.

There’s some sharp witty dialogue, mostly had by Missy.

Capaldi’s eyebrows are in fine form.

The final bit where he saves kid Davros was kinda sweet. And the hand mines were cool.

Now the negative:

I still feel Capaldi’s stiff. That’s a minority opinion, if not outright heretical: the man’s won an Oscar, after all. Granted it may not be entirely fair an evaluation: I went back and looked at some clips from Genesis of the Daleks and those episodes are much more like a stage play than I had recalled (with the sort of sets and props you’d expect from live theatre). The actors over enunciate and there’s a formal, Actor Acting aspect to it at times. Still, I find Baker better inhabits the role than Capaldi. He’s more believable, or was in his early years at any rate. Perhaps Capaldi just needs a drink before going on camera, or material better suited to his own temperament. Let the real Capaldi shine through, drop the artifice, go more Gomez.

Poor melancholy Davros Loman is a real downer. He could do with some pharmaceutical pick me ups, if you know what I mean. Maybe Prozac and some therapy. The evil creator of the Daleks is dying, his fire has gone out of the universe, and he’s gotten deadly dull. No megalomaniacal screeds here, just the pathetic bleatings of a green half-man with a blue eye stuck in his forehead.

When Davros tries to convince the Doctor that he’s offering him the chance to kill all the Daleks on Skaro, he just has to touch the cables, no really, just touch the cables, why won’t you touch them, go ahead, you know you want to… it just comes across like my five year old nephew trying to trick me into doing something. Seriously, just touch the cables. Go on. Then all the Daleks will die. Honest. For real and for true. PULL MY FINGER, DOCTOR!

So when the Doctor turns the tables and it is revealed he didn’t buy into Davros’ little deception (and I use the term ‘little’ here deliberately), it comes as no surprise whatever. The big surprise is that Davros has so little emotional intelligence that he thought his scheme would work in the first place. It’s entirely out of character for Davros, who was once a canny operator. He seems to have gone senile as well as soft.

The scenes of emotional, death bed connection between the Doctor and Davros rang like a cell phone on mute. Seemed false and forced and what was I watching? Who did they replace Davros with, anyway? I knew Davros. Davros was a favorite villain of mine, and you, sir, are no Davros.

Of course he’s faking. It’s preposterous.

Sadly Clara fades so far into the background during the episode she might run into Captain Kirk in that episode where he’s always fading away into another reality. They really short changed her character this time around.

The Dalek zombie sewer slime came across as both odd and jarring (Is it a reference to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? He once referred to the Gulag as a sewer system). It’s such a goofy, nonsensical idea you know immediately it’s there to solve something later in the episode, and lo and behold, it does. How convenient. And to be honest, clever in a what are they smoking at the Beeb these days kind of way. And yet the effects used for the slime attacks are retro and highly evocative of the original series. The foam used for Seeds of Death was more convincing, and that’s saying something, and it’s not good. They must have blown the budget on the city sets.

The Daleks are boring. God, they’re dull. I’m sorry, but they are. Boring and dull and incapable of surprises. At all. They just wobble about shouting ‘exterminate’ and wave their plungers ineffectually. They couldn't be duller if they were Dalek Accountants. In fact, those would be more interesting, as they'd have things to say about numbers and taxes. The Daleks just have no menace anymore. They can't properly kill people without them teleporting away, or deal with their own bloody sewage. I mean, honestly, the sewage gets the better of them.

Sewage.

True, they’ve tried over and over again to deal with the Dullness of the Daleks issue, in stories like Evolution of the Daleks, where they tried to hybridize their way out of the dead-end plunger yank-fest. But it always goes back to the same interminable status quo.

The Daleks are less interesting now than when they first met William Hartnell. There was still a smidgeon of nuance around them in those early days. Now, they’re just one note pepper pots. Dalek dialogue feels so limited you could take bits from other episodes and cobble together all the responses you’d need for a slew of new episodes.

That’s how limited these tin cans are. No range at all.

They're almost background elements, like fire hydrants or trees.

Brilliant idea and concept, of course, but they need room to grow. That or they should be retired until someone can think of something, anything, interesting to do with these perpetually peeved hate machines.

Or does the Terry Nation estate prevent any meaningful alterations to their nature?

Or perhaps they really are setting up a new threat, one that will replace the Daleks: Doctor Who and the Unstoppable Undead Sewage. 

I confess I don't see the toy potential.

The Doctor says he went to see Davros because ‘you asked’. But he runs away and hides in the Thirteenth Century, throws a three week farewell party, hides from Mr. Snake and expects to die and has no hope. So… all you have to do is ask? Does guilt over not saving kid Davros’ rot his soul that much? The Doctor’s done a lot worse over the years to a lot better people. I just found this death wish because 'Davros asked him to’ made no emotional sense. Of course, the Doctor lies. It still doesn’t make sense.

That’s all I have to say about our good Doctor.

I should love this way-out-there, whacky program, what with its brilliant premise and history and admirable British eccentricity. But I’m not. The show is just not connecting with my inner eleven year old. 

C'est la vie.

I’d rather go watch Sicario again.

Good movie. Go see it.











 

Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice Review

 

Doctor Who has always been a bit daffy.

Eccentric like a crazy uncle.

The television equivalent of what you'd get if you merged the local cat lady with a hyper-active five year old and a mad conspiracy theorist, and then irresponsibly pumped fifty cups of coffee into your new, three tongued hydra.

It's wonderfully entertaining at times, but doesn't make a lick of sense.

Which brings me to The Magician's Apprentice.

I'm not the target demographic for this show. Not by a long shot. I probably shouldn't even be watching it. Which may explain why everyone else loved it while I sat gob smacked.

The episode did cause a memory to gurgle out of my grey matter. That's right: my brain gurgles. A memory I acquired from an article some time ago, in which the Doctor Who showrunner said emphatically that one should never indulge in fan service, as it alienates the broader audience.

Presumably this is a different show runner.

The season opener connects back to an episode filmed some forty years ago, and even includes actual footage from it. Hello, Tom. An ethical dilemma is presented to the Doctor: would you kill a boy if you knew he would grow up to be totally evil and kill millions? It's the old time travelers' kill Hitler ice breaker question.

Probably used as a pickup line in time traveler bars.

And the pre-credit opening was very good. Just cracking, really. Superb. I know enough about the program I wasn't lost when they dropped the name 'Davros'. A cool twist, no question about it.

And then the episode goes flying all over the place, throwing scenes at the walls as if someone gave the Attention Deficit Disorder writer a bag of jelly beans and a gallon of coke.

It was zany and over the top over the top, doubly so, even. There's a tank and a guitar and stopped planes (in midair) and snake men and invisible planets and all kinds of batsh*t crazy stuff.

Michelle Gomez eats it up with a little silver spoon and oodles of panache. As Missy, she steals the show, the silver ware, and probably all the towels. She's completely at ease in her psychopathic, mass-mudering character, and has an absolute ball.

Peter Capaldi, on the other hand, is much stiffer. Maybe Gomez excites him. Who knows? She tickled the balls of the Daleks. So cheeky. Anyway, I've enjoyed Capaldi elsewhere, but here, on Who, he's tightened up. It's almost as if he cares too much. I keep feeling like I'm watching Peter Capaldi acting, which is not how I've usually felt previously when he's been in front of a camera performing. It's odd. Perhaps it is the material they're giving him. I don't know.

So much of the episode made no sense. The guitar bit felt like excessive turkey stuffing, although the frozen planes I can forgive Because Coolness. Yet I think Missy could have found Clara without them. The invisible planet? Seems a lot of trouble when they could have just shut the windows on the spacecraft, or put a bag over his head. There are cheaper solutions.

Generally I approve of wildly over the top excess. But here… I'm not so sure. It seemed to detract from the flow of the story.

Moffat is endlessly clever, and quite the wit, but his stories always feel glib and choppy, prone to hop about from here to there and back again, like an itinerant Hobbit on speed. The opening scene alone is worth the price of admission, but after that, the energy started to dissipate.

The trailer for next week, however, teases wonderful moral conundrums for our dear Doctor, enough to make him scarf a bucket of Jelly Babies, although I still have qualms. Why The Doctor bothered to confront Davros the way he did felt to me more like an action foisted upon him by a writer interested in exploring an interesting conundrum than something the Doctor would actually do. It needed more buttressing for me to buy it.

Nevermind.

We are in this to be entertained, so much can be overlooked or forgiven or memory holed, and I am intrigued enough to see how it plays out next episode.

Can Moffat rise above a pat ending and deliver something superlative?

A cherry for a forty-year old cake?

He may indeed...

Fear the Walking Dead: The Dog

I really dug the first two episodes, but the third went (a bit) off the rails.

First, the characters flubbed my idiosyncratic Viewer Turing Test.

Oh, not all at once, and not instantly, to be sure.

I liked the drug addicted kid in the first two episodes, for example. And the dad, Travis. He always seems believably concerned. And the mom… she's awesome. Always something going on behind her eyes. The daughter not so much, but she hasn't been given a lot to do yet, other than wear short-shorts.

Not that I'm complaining. 

The show's atmospheric and creepy and has some fabulously charged scenes. The drive by the hospital was great. Incredibly well staged and expensive looking. The earlier scenes in the church were freaky. The video of the undead attacking emergency response workers, chilling.

And the scene with Travis entering the house invaded by the undead positively crackled with tension.

It was, dare I say, scary.

There's a lot of good stuff here. A lot of potential.

But something underneath all the cool superficialities doesn't sit right with me.

The characters felt more like Writer Puppets rather than Independent Actors. Yes, I know. All characters are puppets.

I mean, duh.

But you don't want the readers (or viewers) to see the strings That's the trick and admittedly it's much more difficult to do than one might think.

This time, I was noticing those darn strings, making the episode an odd mixture of 'okay, I dig it' and 'WTF?'

Travis' resolute pacifism, even in the face of the zombie apocalypse, in particular feels more and more… forced. More of a writer's point, even, or a personality trait written in bold on a character sheet, than a real attitude.

They need to ground his anti-gun position solidly, and soon, or abandon it.

I mean, he's seen infected people peppered with bullets, yet keep on coming. He's seen a guy get his face blown off and not go down. The very same guy who just tried to eat his face, I might add, moments before. Even after his near face-off, Travis lectures Daniel to NOT teach his son Chris how to defend himself with a gun.

The simmering hostility bit between Travis and Daniel felt forced, just there to ramp up the tension a little more.

Ah well. As Daniel says, "The good people die first."

Let's hope so.

Second, the ending of the episode felt… off.

It wasn't the arrival of the cavalry. I have nothing against cavalry charging to save the day, every now and then. They can be fun and uplifting and all that, but here, it seemed like the army dropped in literally from out of nowhere.

This may be me being too picky, but think about it.

One minute, the street is empty. All our heroine sees is Patrick arriving home in his car. The street's otherwise deserted.

The next moment, troops are all over the block.

I know she's all tunnel vision on Patrick, but come on: a convoy of huge army trucks isn't going to catch your eye? Especially when flanked by soldiers running around with automatic weapons out, shooting walking dead people?

Perhaps I didn't understand the staging, but then, it's the responsibility of the filmmaker orient the viewer.

Shouldn't the army trucks have been right behind Patrick?

They were coming from the same direction, after all, down a long street they did a crane shot of later, which means Patrick would have had to PASS the army to get to his house. He would have seen soldiers running house to house, guns out, like they were in active combat. Yet he asks no questions? In fact, he seems completely oblivious to what's going on, other than acknowledging that the airport is closed. He has no idea why. How did he drive all that way without seeing anything?

And considering it was an infected area being cleared by the military block by block, surely the US Army would set up road blocks and not let people back in until the job was finished.

Wouldn't they?

I don't mind the army showing up. I just wish they'd staged it in a more believable way that didn't leave me going wait, what, huh, how, where, why…?

This could all be put down to the short hand necessary to write and produce a TV show on a tight schedule and limited budget. Still, it was in such sharp contrast to some of the well staged scenes (like the hospital drive by), it brought the whole unnecessarily down.

But I'm still watching. I'm looking forward to seeing how the army loses control of the situation.

I did notice that soldiers put a big 'X' on a house. This signaled to realist Daniel (who's in simultaneous love-goggle denial about Griselda's impending demise) that things are already too late. I'm guessing because the army is only containing zombies in homes, rather than going in and clearing them out: the difference between spray paint baby blue and big black infected X.

A fascinating touch. 

Retro-review: Revisiting Flash - a-ah - Saviour of the universe!

Klytus, I'm bored. What play thing can you offer me today?

For pure, ridiculous fun, nothing beats Flash Gordon. It's sugar saturated sci-fi cheese. You couldn't, survive on a diet of such fare, but it makes for a great treat after a season of, say, The Wire (which is so grim it's like beating your hopes with a two by four for an hour), or a grueling day in the corporate trenches fighting rival fiefdoms. I mean departments. But enough of reality.

Every now and then you want leave all your concerns behind, slip the surly bonds of earth and flit about in the stratosphere of juvenile silliness.

If such is your desire, I humbly recommend the critically savaged 1980 Flash Gordon.

It's right up there with delights like Army of Darkness and Galaxy Quest.

Based on the comic strip by Alex Raymond (which was King Features Syndicate's answer to Buck Rogers), this movie doesn't just indulge in tropes, it revels in them. It's like someone sent the writer's internal sophistication censor packing and let his inner ten year old run riot: there are Hawkmen, an entire people of Robin Hood look-a-likes in tights (honestly, is there only one clothes manufacturer in Arborea?), floating cities, ray guns, sword fights, rocket cycles, hideous monsters, beautiful maidens and seductive femme fatales.

What's not to like?

According to the director, Mike Hodges (who also directed Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man), it's "the only improvised $27 million dollar movie ever made."

In one early scene, our eponymous hero actually identifies himself to the alien Emperor Ming as 'Quarterback, New York Jets' as this would have meaning to an alien overlord. Then he plays 'irresistible force' linebacker to Ming's flat footed Imperial Goon Squad lineup, and starts tossing about a metal egg like it's a football, all while Dale Arden cheers him on from the sidelines.

Flash shows aliens how it's done football style.
All astronauts in future should be NFL quarterbacks.

It's gob smacking, high octane kitsch and it's totally awesome.

That's the miracle of Flash Gordon.

You know immediately it wasn't made in the USA: European DNA suffuses the flick and there are few Americans in the cast. In particular, the over-the-top art direction (What isn't over-the-top about Flash Gordon?) is more reminiscent of Barbarella rather than Star Wars.

And then there's the sociopolitical subtext. It's most obvious in the hero and the villains, who embody stereotypes from the mid-Twentieth Century.

Ming's control panel of Dooooooom:
complete with hail, earthquake, and volcano options!
Does Walmart carry these?

Flash Gordon (Sam Jones), the all American football quarterback hero, simply put, is America: bright eyed, naive, idealistic, and brimming with hope and positivity. He's eager to stand up for what's right while being utterly oblivious to larger political ramifications. His exhortations to team up and fight Ming ("Ming is the enemy of every creature of Mongo! Let's all team up and fight him.") are so simple minded as to seem childish to the jaded barons of Mongo. These lords cannot even conceive of playing a positive sum game, so broken is their sense of altruism and justice.

Nor do they even know how to cry or feel empathy. So sad.

Outer Space Eurotrash Sophisticates. 'Pitiful earthlings, who can save you now?'

Flash's idealism stands in sharp contrast to these inhabitants of Mongo, who are all played by Europeans: Max von Sydow (Ming), Timothy Dalton (Barin), Brian Blessed (Vultan), Peter Wyngarde (General Klytus), Mariangela Melato (Kala), and Ornella Muti (Aura). They're sophisticated, cynical, duplicitous, Machiavellian, and engaged in endless, internecine struggle. They'd stab their own mother in the back. Dominated by their tyrannical Emperor Ming, they believe one can only win if others lose. Their hearts have been hardened by despotism and oppression, and they exist without hope or belief that things can be different.

It's a planet of narcissistic manipulators who lack all empathy. But they have sex appeal to make up for it.

Idealize, devalue, discard, baby.
The Mongons (?) lecture with sophisticated British or Italian accents, while Flash sounds like he just left a farm in Kansas. Ming is verbally dexterous, spinning webs with seductive words, while Flash uses them with the finesse of a Big Bud 747 tractor. Naive, honest, direct vs. seductive, beguiling, deceitful. Which would you prefer? Think of it as a self-revelation test.

Casting the urbane Max Von Sydow as Ming was a stroke of genius. The veteran actor contrasts beautifully with Sam Jones' Flash. Sydow's Ming is a brilliant, charistmatic megalomaniacal, narcissistic psychopath.

Flash identifies Ming's true nature within the first few minutes of encountering the dictator. It isn't hard: Ming is busy demanding a subject fall on his own sword to demonstrate his loyalty when our heroic trio of daring earthlings arrive. Flash rather unwisely identifies Ming, out loud, as a psycho (Speak truth to power!), which is overheard by a security robot. This inevitably leads to Flash being sentenced to death.

Rulers of the Universe don't like hearing the truth from alien country bumpkins.

Physcially, the pair are opposites: Flash has youthful good looks and great hair, while Ming is old and chrome dome bald. You know who the good guy is with a glance. Cinema short hand in action.

Flash himself goes through the film actually labelled, "Flash". In the font of the movie's logo. So Meta.

It's no surprise that the 25 year old Sam Jones, who did most of his own stunts, is outclassed by his European counterparts, most of whom were experienced stage actors. But it works: he's meant to be simple, all the better for sophisticates to look down upon. Flash is the American interloper, the earnest G.I., the bourgeois American, blundering about with a surfeit of good will and helpfulness while the shocked Mongo elites stand agog at his lack of manners and insight. Doesn't he know it's a dog eats dog world? That you cannot trust anyone? Cooperation and compromise is for rubes.

Wake up! Remember Munich!

Which brings us to Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol). Zarkov represents The Jewish Other, for, despite his European accent, he's not from Mongo. It's no coincidence Flash is accompanied by a Jewish scientist: hundreds fled Europe to escape persecution by the Nazis. Ming's minion Klytus, head of Mongo's secret police, even praises Hitler.

Yet Zarkov doesn't fit in on earth, either, where his theories got him expelled from NASA, America's science Mecca. He's a one man diaspora, who doesn't fit in anywhere, not quite. But he does work well with Flash, the living embodiment of the American Superego. Jim Crow and the uglier aspects of America couldn't fit on Zarkov's rocket, and didn't make it over to (European) Mongo. Resourceful, intelligent, and moral, Zarkov's a slice of Einstein mixed with secret agent. He's the brains of the trio.

Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) is the perfect female compliment to Flash, all earnest and well meaning American pie. She's also proves resourceful and spunky, as a New York gal should.

The film could be said to work on another level still, with Flash representing American entertainment, Hollywood, penetrating into Europe's higher brow but fractured cultural milieu. Hollywood was overwhelming European studios and establishing huge sci-fi blockbuster beachheads with hits like Star Wars in 1977.

Now it was time for The Europeans Strike Back. Many attempts have been made to mimic Hollywood's sci-fi success, such as the batsh*t insane LifeForce, but Flash Gordon is the one that successfully fused European and American DNA.

The capital looks like a great big red wedding cake.

Thoroughly tongue in cheek, and all the better for it, Flash Gordon knows it is silly and preposterous, like the fevered dream of a ten year old boy, a spiritual ancestor of Axe Cop, yet also manages to also be relentlessly fun and enjoyable.

The screenwriter,  Lorenzo Semple, Jr., also wrote for the Sixties Batman TV show, and it shows. Batman and Flash share a similar, campy sensibility, although Flash is buoyed by a far bigger budget and has better action sequences with real tension. That so much money was thrown at such an eccentric script can be disconcerting for some audience members who are more fiscally responsible.

In fact, Semple himself didn't want to make it a comedy:

"Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved... I never thought the character of Flash in the script was particularly good. But there was no pressure to make it any better. Dino had a vision of a comic-strip character treated in a comic style. That was silly, because Flash Gordon was never intended to be funny. The entire film got way out of control." 

And Dino only read Semple's scripts after they were translated into Italian:

"He reads English better than many people realize, but translates all of his scripts into Italian. We were living in Nantucket at the time, and his translator was a woman whose name I forget. She could barely translate the scripts; if it said, 'The tall, beautiful woman walked into the room,' she'd say, 'Oh, what a beautiful cat.'"

It just gets more absurd: on set, not only could many people not communicate on essential matters due to language barriers, not everyone was even on the same page regarding the tone of the film, at least according to Melody Anderson (Dale Arden):

"The director said, 'I want you and Sam to try to go for a relationship, make this as human as possible. Don't camp it up or go for laughs.' That's why the movie's so funny, because we didn't try to make it campy. In fact, I'm surprised that (people) are laughing, because we weren't out to make a funny film. In fact, De Laurentiis was very upset when he showed the film and people started to laugh, because he thought they were laughing at it and not with it. In fact, he re-did the cheerleading scene. He wanted it to be serious...with macho man out there. Play it very straight, the more you play it straight, the funnier it is. I think that's why Flash and Dale work, because of the way we played it."  

"I'm supposed to serious here, right, guys?… I'll just play it straight."

Sometimes when you skirt the edge of The Abyss of Total and Utter Catastrophe you wind up escaping with something unexpectedly, accidentally wonderful.

Personally, I love the film's humour and unrestrained, campy joie de vivre style, and wouldn't have it any other way.

The sets and costumes look like they were designed by a madman, something Dali might dream up, and the film has aged better for it. The art director, Danilo Donati, outdid himself with his grandiose, operatic sets and sexy-silly costumes of gold trim and spandex and guaze. There's just nothing out there to really compare it to, other than, perhaps, Barbarella or Fellini's pictures. Sadly, those are virtually unwatchable today. Frighteningly, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis actually wanted Fellini to direct originally.

Brrr.

Bullet dodged, there.

Lava lamp skies of pink, white, and purple swirl over the jagged gold and red capital of Mongo City, while ginormous trees stretch up to infinite heights in Arborea. Everything is warped and exaggerated, like in a fun house mirror. Mongo City is machined oppression, the fantasy of a control freak, while Arborea is nature run amok. It's a spiritually empty but scientifically advanced urban state vs. rural tree hugging druids who dress like Robin Hood. There is even a court jester of sorts in Arborea, a wise counsel for the stiff, Prince Barin. Barin doesn't like what his spirit guide says, but knows he needs to hear it. Techno-Emperor Ming would have such an insolent figure executed before breakfast. The Hawkman's floating sky city is airy and dream like, detached from the concerns of the rest of the world, their isolationist 'I stick my neck out for no man' position delivering them inevitably into subservience to Ming.

For divided the kingdoms of Mongo are easily dominated by the Machiavellian despot. As Princess Aura observes, "Every moon of Mongo is a kingdom. My father keeps them fighting each other constantly. It's a really brilliant strategy."

Sound familiar?

It should.

Flash and Barin face off on a spinning disk with extendable steel spikes.
Because… everything is better on a wobbly, spinning disk
covered in sharp spikes over a bottomless abyss.
Try it with your next company meeting!

There are great action sequences, and yet the goofiness is never allowed to undermine them or rob the film of (admittedly lighthearted) dramatic tension. It's a cartoon struggle for an alien world, but still a struggle, and not quite so wink-wink that you're thrown out of the adventure aspect entirely.

Most of the characters get at least a few instantly classic lines:

Princess Aura: But my father has never kept a vow in his life!
Dale Arden: I can't help that, Aura. Keeping our word is one of the things that make us better than you.

Ming: It's what they call tears. It's a sign of their weakness.

And then there's the kick-ass theme song. It was the first time a rock band scored a major picture (they'd follow it up with Highlander's score), and Queen threw themselves into the task with gusto. Dino had never heard of them before, but he was nothing if not willing to experiment. They came back with a soundtrack that makes you want to stand up and cheer, it's that feel good.

The lyrics bear repeating:

Flash - a-ah - saviour of the universe
Flash - a-ah - he'll save everyone of us
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Flash - a-ah - he's a miracle
Flash - a-ah - king of the impossible
He's for everyone of us
Stand for everyone of us
He'll save with a mighty hand
Every man every woman
Every child - with a mighty flash
Flash - a-ah
Flash - a-ah - he'll save everyone of us
Just a man
With a man's courage
He knows nothing but a man
But he can never fail
No one but the pure in heart
May find the golden grail
Oh oh - oh oh
Flash

Yeah. Go, Flash, go!

Flash is sentenced to death for defying Ming, while Dale is sentenced to… marry the lecherous despot. Hard to say which would be worse. Zarkov is shuttled off to be brainwashed and turned into an agent of the secret police.

Saved by a lustful and slinkily seductive Princess Aura, Flash must then endure the machinations of a jealous rival, the Prince Barin. Oh, those silly blue bloods. She's a little bit wanton, he's a little wooden woodie.

"You mean you two… and he… and I'm… Oooh, that's not good. Can you say, 'Triangulation'?"

Flash even has a nice, quiet one-on-one chat with Ming the Merciless along the way. Ming weaves verbal rings around him, and tempts Luke – I mean Flash – to The Dark Side by offering the young man a kingdom of his very own: the earth. After, that is, Ming's finally finished 'toying' with it. Which is a polite way of saying 'kicking the planet about and killing billions'. Ever noble, our man Flash turns the offer down and flies a battlecruiser into Ming's wedding.


It's a move right out of G.R.R. Martin's playbook.

Ming's minions are so decadent, so used to being on top and facing little to no real resistance, that when the revolution arrives they are poorly prepared for it and start to fold like cheap chairs.

Of course, Flash saves the universe in the end, as your inner 10 year old would expect. The naive young do-gooder and all American boy unites cynical, decadent alien aristocrats in opposition to real evil and triumphs in spectacular fashion. A new, better day dawns.

Boo-yah, baby!

The film's tone is supercharged feel good, and this is reinforced by the rocking sound track and zany dialogue.

The climax reunites the characters from earth (who, oddly, are rarely in each others' physical presence after the first third of the film) and Flash delivers all Mongo from Ming's oppressive grasp. Mortally wounded, the weakening emperor vanishes into his power ring, which clatters to the floor. Flash is informed the earth has been saved and jumps for joy into a freeze frame.

As the credits roll, Ming's ring is picked up by a mysterious, black gloved hand. We hear Ming's laughter, and the words, 'The End' appear on the screen, followed by… a question mark.

Is it really the end, after all?

Yeah, pretty much.

At least for this iteration of the franchise. Which may be just as well. Given the haphazard way it came together, recapturing the original's unintentionally madcap magicwould have been a very difficult task indeed. This was a freakish, one-of-a-kind happy accident.

But what we have is pretty awesome.

"Give me the sugar, baby!"

Flash delivers.