Mamdani, Manchin, Epstein: quick notes

There are parts of NYC that have a shortage of public restrooms. Mayor Zohram Mamdani’s solution: high-tech port-a-potties with a 10-minute limit. He’s also working on a tech policy to make city services run smoother: “Every confusing step and every dead-end portal makes it more difficult for government to deliver for New Yorkers, and for New Yorkers to trust that government is working to deliver for them. Every straightforward experience New Yorkers have on city platforms rebuilds that trust and our PIT crews will help us do exactly that.”

Former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently announced he’s forming a new political grift — er, group — to push politicians towards the center. At the link, my assumption was that this means pushing Dems rightwards, not pushing Republicans leftwards. Sure enough, he’s supporting Sen. Susan Collins against her Democratic challenger on the ground she always does the right thing. Yeah, like supporting RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth for cabinet posts. And wringing her hands in concern over the Toddler Administration’s policies, then voting to support them anyway. I called it on Manchin.

Then we have new AG Todd “I’m so over the Epstein Files” Blanche refusing to turn over more files despite a judge’s order. Rep. Thomas Massie has been pushing for the release of the files as well as the impeachment of Hegseth. By a strange coincidence, Speaker Mike Johnson has recessed the House early …

Speaking of Jeffrey Epstein, “Two women whose images as girls ‌were found in pornography seized from Jeffrey Epstein filed a class action lawsuit on Wednesday seeking damages from the late sex offender’s estate for individuals featured in his collection of thousands of pictures and videos of child sexual abuse material.

The lawsuit seeks ​at least $6 million on behalf of more than 40 people, some of whom were in Epstein’s ​so-called “modeling book,” a collection of sexualized images of children seized by federal investigators in ⁠2019 from his New York home, according to the filing, opens new tab in Manhattan federal district court.” Obviously getting money from his estate won’t make things worse for Epstein, but it still feels like a little bit of justice.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Let No Man Put Asunder: the character arcs

As I’ve mentioned before, Let No Man Put Asunder is a rewrite of my second novel. I rewrote it in the 1990s and improved it with no better result getting publisher or agent attention. I tried a third rewrite which never got a finished draft, and now this version, which is much stronger. Maybe not stronger yet than version two — that one was really good — but I think it will be by the time I finish.

Last week I discussed one of the changes from the previous versions: a much larger cast. Going over the manuscript this week and thinking about Paul and Mandy’s character arcs, I saw another problem. To wit, that I’ve given them similar character arcs to their earlier incarnations, Neil and Adrienne, and they’re not the same people.

Neil and Adrienne were in a good place when their adventures began. Adrienne, an archeology/history buff, daydreams of uncovering lost cities; Neil fantasizes about being a hardboiled PI. That’s as far as their discomfort goes. I wanted to make them ordinary people, happy in their lives, when they’re dragged into a crazy world of adventure against their will.

Paul and Mandy aren’t in a good place. Paul’s dispute with his parents over his academic future has ended with them cutting off support; he’s now busing tables at a greasy spoon to support himself. Mandy, after years caring for her invalid father and raising her five siblings (Mom decided Dad’s terminal illness was too much to deal with so she split). Now her dad is dead, her brothers and sisters are out of the house, she’s ready to start living her own life … and yet she has no idea what to do next (there are reasons).

I have a rough idea of their emotional state when the book starts but going over it made me see I need a much stronger grasp. Paul in particular. Mandy could keep going the way she is for a while; Paul’s feeling a lot more stress. Does he want to resume his academic life? Make a clean break? Reconcile with his parents? Build a life without them?

As I’ve blogged about several times, Orson Scott Card breaks down four types of stories. They can center on the milieu, a question, the character arc or the plot. Maria in Southern Discomfort starts in crisis and ends with the crisis resolved. Her experiences in Pharisee Ga. stem partly out of her own decisions. Paul and Mandy, on the other hand, didn’t do anything. Other hands pulled strings and brought on the crisis in which they find themselves, hunted by mercenaries through the streets of Bluestone, Pa. It’s more plot-driven than character driven

Nevertheless, the first chapter is heavily focused on their personal problems and their discomfort with their lives. The ending chapter, at least in the second draft deals with them wrapping up their personal conflicts or at any rate making a start on fixing them. Their character arc is just as important as the plot arc. I have to know where they are at the start and how the adventure changes them. Unlike Neil, Paul doesn’t fantasize about being Sam Spade or Mike Hammer and he’s not getting a thrill off being plunged into danger. And the revelations about how he got involved in this will be way more unsettling than what Neil discovered.

Neil’s arc also involved him meeting his dream woman — not necessarily eternal love, but way more than the casual affairs he’s experienced. As I wrote in the previous post, Cordelia/Paul doesn’t seem to work the same way, so maybe not. For Mandy, I have a clearer idea of her ending arc and ideally sex is part of it — but again, the guy she sleeps with doesn’t seem to fit the book at all. Different lover? Change the arc? I’m not sure.

While there’s clearly a lot of work ahead, all of this is fixable. Hopefully without taking as long as I usually do.

Cover image by Sam Collins, all rights are mine.

Leave a comment

Filed under Southern Discomfort, Story Problems, Writing

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., bringer of plague and death

Make America healthy again you say? So open up thousands more hospitals around the country especially in rural areas or towns where private equity is buying them up and stripping them for parts? Make healthcare free for all? Invest in a big push to train and hire more doctors and healthcare workers? Is that what they want to do?” — Luke O’Neil, who points out the answer is no.

Neither RFK nor anyone in the Toddler Administration wants to make us healthier. Rather than help people they’d sooner see the poor and uninsured die and decrease the surplus population. After all, they have money and world-class healthcare — they’ll never have to worry about being part of the surplus. Whatever hellish effect RFK is about to have on preventive medicine, he’ll make out fine.

Minorities, though? “The Health Department’s office to improve the health of minorities has abruptly terminated more than half its existing grants, saying they didn’t focus on the Trump administration’s new priorities of addressing infertility and encouraging exercise. Some grantees provided cancer screenings or postpartum home visits. Others worked to reduce first-responder suicide or decrease obesity among Native American youth. All of the funds came from the Office of Minority Health, which the administration tried to shutter last year.”

Kennedy, of course, is an anti-vax zealot. Measles is killing Americans again, probably way more than we know of, but the response from Kennedy’s department and the anti-vax movement is deny, deny, denymeasles didn’t kill them, total coincidence they had it when they died. Kennedy says that of course he cares about the dead children but “They get headlines. We should care about the children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.” Never mind that measles is a serious threat and vaccines are not, Kennedy’s got a crackpot conspiracy theory to push! Speaking of which, his department’s also investigating the non-existent threat of chemtrails.

As Scott Lemieux says, “The strategy that RFK Jr. is using to try to deny responsibility for the effects of his measles outbreak is the same one Bari Weiss tried to use to diminish the impact of the food blockade in Gaza — since the people who face the worst consequences are often those with other health problems, pretend that it’s really only the other health problems that matter, The cynicism and amorality in both cases is readily apparent. There are people dead who would still be alive in Pennsylvania if not for RFK Jr.’s tireless anti-vaccine activism, and many many more who have become seriously ill.” I’ll go out on a limb and say RFK won’t be so careful about causes of death when he investigates whether covid vaccines killed members of the military.

By contrast, Kennedy talks a good game about environmental poisons and eating healthy but the reality? Fruit-flavored vapes are back on the market. Plus “The FDA recently hit a record 19 simultaneous outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños” while cutting inspection staffing. Cattle ranchers will be free to inspect their own meat under a rule to “allow some smaller ranches to bypass USDA-inspected processing facilities” But the Toddler doesn’t care about them: he’s happy to undercut meat prices by shipping in mystery meat bought from a friend of Melania’s. Oh, and at least one Toddler judge has ruled there’s no obligation on government utilities to provide clean drinking water.

As Lemieux says, every Republican Senator except Mitch McConnell voted for Kennedy, even though they knew perfectly well what his policies were. Senator Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) is expressing great concern for the damage RFK Jr. is doing but he voted him in. So did my senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd; Tillis said he voted yes because Kennedy would be a disruptor in healthcare. As I say at the link, I don’t want my healthcare disrupted — I doubt Budd or Tillis would want that, but theirs isn’t at risk.

But they’re fine with the rest of us dying.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Shall we go over the rainbow? Yes we shall!

The Genre Book Club’s topic for September was “banned classics.” As I didn’t feel like reading anything heavy, I went with THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ because yes, it has been banned occasionally — most notably in the 1950s, on the grounds Ozma making sure no-one in her country goes hungry was communist propaganda! And I love the Oz series, so why not?

I’m guessing nobody reading this needs me to explain the story. Suffice to say, the book remains charming, both Baum’s story and W.W. Denslow’s delightful art (below) — though disagreements with Baum led to John R. Neill taking over as illustrator of Oz for most of the series.

What’s most remarkable is that Baum makes me believe in Oz. There’s no world-building, no magic system, yet everything works. When Dorothy and her friends wander into a country of living China dolls late in the book, there’s no set up, nothing that explains why this exists in Oz, but I don’t doubt that it does. That is way harder than it looks.

As a fan of the series as a whole, it’s also interesting to see how the beginning differed from what followed. The implication here is that Oz is an isolated area in the American wilderness, something not implausible in 1900 (Ozma of Oz establishes Oz is its own continent). The deadly desert that surrounds Oz is simply a desert here; later books establish it’s lethal to touch it. Oz appears to be the name of the wizard, not the country. But regardless of such Oz-nerdery, this is a wonderful book.

THE WIZARD OF OZ CATALOG: L. Frank Baum’s Novel, It’s Sequels, and Their Adaptations for Stage, Television, Movies, Radios, Music Videos, Comic Books, Commercials and More was my second book for McFarland (it’s still available) and my best seller: as I guessed when I proposed it, interest in Oz drew a lot of attention.

Rereading it now, it suffers from the fact so many of the adaptations have the same basic plot (something I handled better in Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I think). However it’s still an impressive, exhaustive job. And it’s fascinating to be reminded of the Oz legend’s global reach with Australian, English, Turkish, Russian, Brazilian and Japanese adaptations and spinoffs; of the nerdy enthusiasm of fanfic authors for giving even the most obscure characters their own stories; and the many strange takes out there such as Ken Kesey’s Twister, described as “the single weirdest production in this book, and that’s saying something.”

It’s also amazing how flexible the Oz story is. Take one person who’s stupid (or thinks they are), one person who’s heartless and a third whose cowardly and people know what’s going down. I’ve seen that adapted to sales videos, How To Use The Library training films, and a Fantasy Island episode.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Reading

Dead Templars, a bouncer and a virgin: mediocre movies and TV

The Spanish film THE BLIND DEAD (1972), AKA Tombs of the Blind Dead, didn’t do much for me but it was popular enough to spawn three sequels. After an argument with her traveling companions, a young woman gets off the train she’s riding and takes shelter for the night in an old castle. This unfortunately stirs up the inhabitants: Templars hung in medieval times for their Satanic practices after which crows pecked out their eyes. The blind Templars rise out of their tombs and go on a killing spree, hunting their prey by sound (so The Quiet Place would be a good double bill). It’s a competently executed film, but it didn’t do much for me. “Black masses are a thing of the past, doctor.”

I watched ROAD HOUSE (1989) because TYG had it streaming last weekend; I’ve never seen it before and can’t say I missed anything. Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, a bouncer — sorry, a “cooler” which is apparently a head bouncer — who takes a job bringing order to Tombstone — er, to a wild, rowdy road house which is also under threat from local extortionist Ben Gazzara (I assume he took the gig for the money but he makes his villain far better than the film deserves). This is predictable — I figured out the fate of Swayze’s mentor (Sam Elliott) as soon as he showed up — but adequate to fill some time with. “It seems everywhere I go, I hear that same joke.”

VIRGIN OF THE SECRET SERVICE (1968) pits dauntless Captain Robert Virgin (Clinton Greyn), his aide Doublett (John Cater) and adventurer/photographer Mrs. Cortez (Veronica Strong) against German schemes to bring down the empire. In the first, the bad guys are working with an Afghan ruler to weaken British control of the area; in the second, they’re sponsoring a Chinese conspiracy. Teaming Cortez and Virgin makes me think they’re shooting for a Steed and Mrs. Peel vibe but despite some tongue-in-cheek moments they don’t come anywhere near close. Nor do lines about “Chinks” and the Yellow Peril go over well. I gave up on this after a couple of episodes. “Did you know French girls sit around in their birthday suits?”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Movies, TV

So far I’m one step ahead of the axe-men

You know, these axemen. I’ve posted this Billy Graham cover before because it sums up the way life keeps bushwhacking us just when we think we’re out from under. There were more axemen this week than expected but like the first week of September, the work got done.

A lot of the distractions were paperwork, like submitting for our dogs various recent vet visits, ordering fresh dog drugs, etc. There was also tiredness due to Trixie’s drug regimen keeping up up late to get the last ones in. Her UTI and her GI issues have resolved themselves, though, and the drugs are done. However she developed a slightly shaky left rear leg so we have an appointment this Saturday. It’s nothing serious but it’s definitely not normal — I don’t want to wait for serious discomfort like we did with the GI bleed.

Despite the leg, she’s 100 percent better from last weekend. Hungry, bouncy, eager to play, willing to walk and just more her usual self. Dudley too is in good shape. We had his rehab recheck Monday and the vet gushed over the great shape he’s in for nearly 16. Yay Dudders, yay vet, yay us for taking good care.

Overall life was nowhere near as intense as last week. However it was intense enough I didn’t really get to draw breath, either.

So, walk. As one of my October articles for The Local Reporter is a listicle of Carrboro nonprofits I spent Monday researching them. There’s quite a lot for a small town so it’s a good thing I started. I imagine I’ll break them down into different groupings (kid-related, sports, arts, charity, etc.) when I write it next week.

I’ve proofed The Savage Adventures through 1937 which is about 45 percent of the book done. Having reread the second draft of Let No Man Put Asunder last week, I began planning Draft Three. That meant reading a lot of articles about rewriting, developing character arcs, etc., then starting work on Paul and Mandy’s character arcs (details next week). That was very productive; hopefully the work will translate into a smooth, faster-than-usual draft.

My two stories for the Become the Sky anthology have gotten two rounds of editing so I made changes Thursday. This took longer than expected so I didn’t write anything further. However the critiques were really good and the stories are stronger for it. So yay. If all goes well we’ll have this out before year’s end so you can decide for yourself.

Oh, and my sensitive teeth appear to be getting back to normal so maybe a crown won’t be necessary. Hurray! Second hurray, I sold another copy of Southern Discomfort. Whoever you were, thank you — I hope you enjoy it.

After I wrote the first draft of this post, I realized something else about this week: I’m waaaaay more focused than I have been in a while. I’m having no trouble concentrating on my work and only wandering off to check BlueSky (or whatever) occasionally. That hasn’t been the case in … a while? I’m not sure what changed but hopefully I can keep it up next week (much chaotic stuff to deal with, details next Friday). Because it feels good.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Southern Discomfort, Story Problems, Time management and goals, Writing

Two two-pet photos

Plushie and Wisp. They don’t usually share the couch like this.

And the Plush One and Snowdrop staring as TYG enters the kitchen

Leave a comment

Filed under The Dog Ate My Homework

Anyone who says the Toddler has made the world respect us is repeating a lie

Maybe they believe it, maybe not, but a lie it is.

Take for example, Jared Kushner. It’s bad enough the president sends his son-in-law, with zero diplomatic skills, to negotiate in the Middle East. But now he’s complaining that he could give Ukraine a peace deal if they’d just give Moscow some territory. Just like the rest of the Toddler’s crime family, Kushner is willing to do business with anyone if the price is right, and has no qualms mixing personal profit with diplomacy. Though to be fair, his support for Putin’s agenda may just be because his father in law and lots of Republicans adore Putin. That said, “in scale and audacity, what Kushner has attempted—and achieved—is on another level entirely. He asked foreign regimes to trust him with billions of dollars even though he’d never managed an investment fund. One former Republican official, as the New York Times noted in April 2024, “could recall no precedent for a government official leaving office and starting an investment firm that would immediately receive billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while serving in government.” And that was before Trump placed Kushner—who had zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power—at the center of every international crisis, elevating him to the role, arguably, of the nation’s leading diplomat.”

And of course, the Toddler is much more worried about the Ukraine hitting Russian targets than the aggressor in the war attacking the Ukraine.

We’ve picked a fight with Canada, a stupid fight and one that’s cutting off our nose to spite our face. It’s stupid and unnecessary but of course, all that matters to the Toddler is winning — he won’t give it up because that would make him a loser and because if it hurts people he doesn’t care.

“America became a country that could not be trusted to honor agreements. It was a country that constantly tried to bully other countries. Our word was worth nothing. Our sanity was not to be taken for granted. And then, of course, along comes Iran, where in addition to showing that we’re not to be trusted, that we’re not going to be relied upon., we also showed that we were far weaker than people imagined.”

Our egomaniac president, having declared Lake Ontario is Lake America, now talks about renaming the oceans. Late suck-up Senator Lindsay Graham suggested we rename the Nobel Peace Prize as the Trump prize.

“Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.”

Marco Rubio, obviously horrified at the thought America or Israel might be restrained from war crimes, wants to destroy the International Criminal Court

The Toddler clams he saw Osama bin Laden as a threat even before 9/11. He’s lying, of course.

The US building small-scale nukes for easier battlefield deployment, under a secret, classified policy? What could go wrong?

Then there’s the Republicans utter opposition to environmentalism. Nuke the whales! Pollute the air and the water!

‘Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture. “The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” Funny how quickly they forget all that “freedom of religion” stuff when it’s convenient.

“The Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.”

The Toddler Administration’s domestic performance doesn’t inspire respect either. We used to get respect for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equal rights, however short we might fall of them in practice. Now the Toddler is willing to sue anyone for even the most anodyne criticism, like saying the Toddler’s use of the National Guard didn’t reduce crime. And the little crybaby, having had his name taken off the Kennedy Center, now wants to destroy it.

And America elected this man twice. Not all of us, but it’s a clear sign the fabled guardrails don’t hold. Another incompetent fascist could come to power. Respect a country where that can happen? Trust them? Not by a long shot.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Third draft challenge: what to do with my cast

Writing Southern Discomfort took more than a decade.

Not that I spent the whole time struggling to create my novel. During that period I had various income-generating writing gigs, I wrote three movie books, I had other fiction projects. Still, I’d prefer to finish Let No Man Put Asunder much more quickly. I am, after all, getting older and with less time left, I feel the need to use it effectively.

Routinely at some point in the creative process I take my most recent draft and shift from repeated pantsing to plotting. With novels, this hasn’t ever worked well. This time, I’m determined it will. I’ve read over the second draft, taken lengthy notes, taken more based on how-to writing books and articles … now the replotting begins.

What have I learned from the reread? For one thing, my book’s gotten way too crowded.

In the previous version (this is a rewrite of an earlier novel) the supporting cast for Neil and Adrienne (now Paul and Mandy) included the telekinetic tween Plutarch; his robot sidekick Talos; chief antagonists Celathion and Grainge; Cordelia Winters, Neil’s swashbuckling love interest; Renador, high-tech thief; and Peacock and Mountebank who show up in the last quarter along with a couple more bit players. Plus Mircalla Karnstein, the vampire from J. Sheridan LeFanu’s “Carmilla,” who appears off-and-on.

In this version, the big change was setting everything in Mandy’s hometown, Bluestone, rather than having Mandy and Paul cast out into the multiverse. I think it’s the right move but an unanticipated side effect is that it’s expanded the cast. Mandy’s siblings. Hillier and Oriel, two Bluestone police detectives investigating the goings on. Plus Renador (now Raga) and Cordelia. Plus Peacock and Mountebank appearing a lot more. Plus Flavia (the former Plutarch) and Talos. And because I made Flavia black, she needs to have more of her own arc than Plutarch did, so she doesn’t end up a helpful Magical Negro.

The book is overstuffed. I think the villains can be worked out without too much trouble but the heroes? Cordelia feels awkward; the romance arc doesn’t work. I’m not sure if she’s become the wrong character as Paul develops, or there’s simply not space to develop it. Raga feels completely tacked on, like he no longer fits the narrative. A shame as I wound up with him and Mandy sleeping together, which fits her character arc (I’ll get into that later). My scene with Countess Karnstein feels awkward too. In the previous draft they stumbled smoothly into her lair, and the fight is intense; here it’s lacking. As I have one of her vampire lackeys taking point to hunt Paul and Mandy, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t leave Karnstein in the background or drop her completely.

Quite simply, there’s not enough space for everyone to develop. It’s not just about them having character arcs — various characters drop out of the plot when it feels like they should stick around. I fixed some of that in this last draft, but not enough. One option is to write bigger and give them all a role. Another, probably the more practical choice, is to trim the cast and develop the rest more.

Which to cut? Raga and the countess most obviously, but beyond that? Well, there’s Mandy’s family: four out of her five siblings show up but it might be better if one of them was out of town.

More on other aspects of the third draft soon.

Cover by Sam Collins, all rights are mine.

1 Comment

Filed under Southern Discomfort, Story Problems, Writing

Once upon a time, this was indeed the greatest adventure

I’m a fan of the late 1970s Flash Gordon animated TV series but somehow I never got around to the 1982 feature-length version, FLASH GORDON: The Greatest Adventure of All. Before blogging about it, a bit of comic-strip history.

The Flash Gordon comic strip debuted in 1934 and blew the people reading the Sundaycomics pages away. In the opening story arc, Dr. Zarkov kidnaps Flash — a champion polo player — and beautiful Dale Arden to come with him to Mongo, a rogue planet hurtling towards Earth. On Mongo they become the resistance leaders against the tyrannical Ming the Merciless and criss-crossing the man cultures of Mongo: the winged Hawkmen, Prince Barin’s foresters, and multiple others.

It’s basic sword-and-planet stuff, the kind the pulps had been doing for more than 20 years by then. However reading it wasn’t the same as seeing it and in those days you didn’t see it. Nothing like it at the movies, no TV, no comic books. Flash Gordon became a star and Alex Raymond a legend. It would become three hit movie serials, a 1950s TV show, then the 1980 film, then the cartoon. And since then various appearances in comic books, the Defenders of Earth cartoon, comic books and more TV. I watched the first episode of the most recent TV show. Not good.

And then there’s The Greatest Adventure of All, which was much more enjoyable. We open in 1939 Warsaw as Olympic athlete turned US diplomat Flash Gordon struggles to help people during the Nazi invasion of Poland. He can’t but he gets a message from a brilliant Polish scientist to deliver to Dr. Zarkov — “One word … Mongo.” Flash and reporter Dale Arden reach Zarkov but the disruptions unleashed by Mongo’s approach force them to escape Zarkov’s isolated laboratory by rocket ship. Destination: Mongo. Can they stop Ming when he wields the terrifying power of atomic fission to fuel his technology? Can Flash unite Mongo’s warring factions into an organized opposition? Will Ming force Dale into marriage? Will his daughter Aura seduce Flash?

It’s action packed and fun … but it got me thinking whether there’s any point to continued revivals. Flash Gordon back when this came out was still a famous name, at least to nerds like me; now I’m not so sure. Certainly sword-and-planet remains popular but when Star Wars films and TV spinoffs fill more or less the same spot in pop culture, does Flash bring anything to the table?

Even the animated film, though it only came out in ’82, looks a little dated. The voice cast, except for Ted Cassidy as the lion man Thun, is forgettable; these days I’d expect a much stronger acting team. And the women’s roles, while true to the original series, are dreadful (making me appreciate John Carter for doing so well with Dejah Thoris). Dale spends the entire film a captive; Aura gets more agency — bad girls often do — but she still winds up facing a forced marriage to Vultan, the king of the Hawkmen (and forced marriage clearly means marital rape). I think it’s possible to do that and still be true to Raymond — but I’m not sure it would sell even so. Of course, it only takes one clever filmmaker to prove me wrong …

Art by Alex Raymond. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Movies, Writing