Tarzan and the Lost Empire - Boris Vallejo book cover art

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Recently, I've posted a lot on science fiction, especially on television and particularly Star Trek. I mean for the scope of this blog to be considerably more broad, so today I bring you this item that surfaced recently as I was re-organizing my book collection.

I came across my Tarzan books from the early 1980's. I have 20 of the original 24 in Edgar Rice Burroughs series about the man raised by apes. Actually, until recently, I had 18, but I've picked up two more recent finds on eBay and alibris.com. There are of course numerous publishings of this series, both hardcover and paperback, in the nearly 100 years since the debut of "Tarzan of the Apes" in 1912. My books are one of at least two mass-market paperback editions published by Ballantine from the 1960's thru the early 1980's, and have black-bordered covers and cover art by Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo. (According to an online interview I found with Boris Vallejo, no single artist has ever illustrated the entire Tarzan series book covers.)

While Neal Adams is certainly no slouch and his art has a somewhat more primitive look that seems very appropriate for books about a jungle-dwelling ape man, I always preferred the Vallejo covers. An example is shown below right.

Pictured here is my copy of "Tarzan and the Lost Empire," about Tarzan's encounter with a group of soldiers separated from the Roman Empire who have been living for generations in a state of cultural suspended animation in the isolated African mountains. This was one of several Tarzan tales that featured "lost cities" hidden in the jungle.

The cover art exemplifies the atmospherics that make Vallejo artwork so interesting to me. Note how the background recedes as if into a mist. Even the fists of Tarzan's gorilla friends seem to be sinking into ground fog. This softening of the background seems to be a Vallejo trademark. "Tarzan and the Castaways" shows dust stirred up by an elephant that appears about to charge, while "Tarzan and the Madman" features Tarzan clinging to the neck of a deadly cape bufflalo in a struggle not to be thrown off and trampled, again with a cloud of dust raised by the fracas.

The color palette is warm, as if the scene is lit by the light of sunrise or sunset or perhaps campfires or torches outside the scene. Chiseled musculature, another Vallejo trademark, is strongly defined on both Tarzan and the menacing Roman Warriors. As for the overall book cover design, the black background and strongly contrasting yellow border lend a simple but graphically pleasing design to this series of books.

Also notice this book's cover price. How long has it been since a paperback could be had for a buck-twenty-five?

"Bring out yer dead!"

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Earlier this week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, recognizing he was in a public relations hole after a recent price increase, doggedly continued to dig deeper by arrogantly "explaining" his past arrogance just before dropping the bomb that the iconic DVD by mail service, along with it's website and billing accounts, would be spun off and given a really stupid name.

Somehow, Hastings managed to shoot himself in the foot even while that very same foot was jammed in his mouth. "You vill use Kvikster and you vill LIKE it."

All this reminds me of a scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," one of the many, MANY movies NOT available for streaming at netflix.com.

In the comedy classic, the "Dead Collector" is pulling a cart door-to-door calling, "Bring out yer dead!" A man brings out his grandfather and places him on the cart, but the sickly old guy protests weakly that he's not yet dead.

Nearly Dead Man: I don't want to go on the cart.

Large Man: Oh, don't be such a baby.

The Dead Collector: I can't take him.

Nearly Dead Man: I feel fine.

Large Man: Oh, do me a favor.

The Dead Collector: I can't.

Large Man: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.

Tech pundits on at least one podcast I've listened to liken the separation of the DVD and streaming businesses to housing one's sickly, nearly dead uncle up in the attic out of sight and mind until he expires.

That Netflix is doing this is understandable. DVD's are dying and Netflix wants to concentrate on the business of the future - streaming. DVD's are already under one layer of obsolescence since the advent of Blu-Ray. But the weak market uptake of this newer format makes even Blu-Ray look pretty diseased and arthritic.

Add to that the fact the DVD side of the Netflix business depends heavily on a healthy United States Postal Service. This once rock-solid government entity now can't seem to get through a fiscal year without racking up a multi-billion dollar loss and having to go hat-in-hand it's governmental parents for a bailout. Continued healthy function of the United States Postal Service will almost certainly depend on immediate positive and constructive action by the United States Congress, an institution famously disinclined toward any action not facilitating immediate short term and shortsighted partisan gain.

This seems similar to when Steve Jobs of Apple unilaterally, and somewhat prematurely, declared the floppy disk dead. History did vindicate his view eventually, but floppies still survived (much as DVD's will) a fair amount of time before succumbing to another now-dead storage medium, the Zip disk.

Netflix clearly thinks the DVD is dead, and I tend to agree. Any physical media I buy comes to me only after an exhaustive and fruitless search for any kind of download option. With music, if iTunes or Amazon doesn't have an mP3 or AAC file available, I sigh heavily and grudgingly schlep to Amazon or Best Buy to purchase a shrink-wrapped plastic disc. Once in hand, the disc is then be shoved into my Mac's optical drive for about 4 minutes and, once it's content was slurped into iTunes, the still shiny round coaster, er, disc, is then be tossed into an out-of-the-way drawer where it molders yet today, never since touched by human hands.

The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Yes he is.

The DVD: I'm not.

The Dead Collector: He isn't.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.

The DVD: I'm getting better. . .

My wife and I have a modest collection of DVD's that has in the last half-decade only grown by a very few "uber favorites," the ones we definitely want available to watch right when the mood strikes us, such as the Christmas favorites "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Story," and the Star Wars movies. (And even these few DVD's were purchased used.) For all else, internet streaming or a delivery of a disc by snail mail is more than adequate.

The HUGE downside to this de-integration of the DVD-by-mail/streaming business for both Netflix and it's users is that current search and rating system will now be fragmented, causing the recommendation engine that has surfaced to many great movies I would not have found otherwise to only recommend from the much smaller pool of streaming moves. No longer will I be able to just search for a movie on streaming, and in the all-too-frequent instance that it is not available for streaming, pop it in the DVD queue.

I was really easy-going about the effective rise in the price of the Netflix DVD and streaming package, as it was still several dollars below my "bargain line." But if I now have to deal with two separate entities for DVD's and streaming, especially when one of them has the totally idiotic name of "Qwikster," Netflix MUST expand their streaming options with massive new content deals, and SOON. Otherwise, shedding the DVD business will be a shot squarely in the foot. Once the separation is complete, I will still go to Netflix first for streaming, but instead of staying on the Netflix site to put a DVD in the queue, I will have to leave them to check out other streaming and DVD offerings. There are a few others now, such as iTunes rentals and Amazon prime, and I'm sure the options will grow in the coming months and years. Netflix might have otherwise kept this marketshare longer if DVD's were still were still integral to it's business, thereby giving it more time to become an even more dominant player in streaming.

Maybe Netflix wants to sell the DVD enterprise? If so, why dress it up like a corpse and give it a dippy name?

Perhaps there is an opportunity for a third party to license the Netflix recommendation engine and incorporate it into an aggregator for different DVD and streaming services, similar to what is now done by Boxee.

Whatever happens, all I can say is, "Sorry, Netflix. I'd get that foot looked at by a doctor if I were you. . ."

Hour One out of Fifteen Hundred -- "The Man Trap"

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So, I did a little math today.

There are 79 episodes of the original Star Trek series. I haven't kept track, but I don't think it would exaggerate to say I've seen all of those, on average, six times each. If I channel surf into some episodes, like "Spock's Brain," I am very likely to continue surfing until I find something more intelligent, like maybe "Saved By The Bell." But if I happen on to "The Ultimate Computer" or "The Doomsday Machine," the seat cushions are guaranteed to stay warm for the remainder of the hour.

First part of the math equation: six views times 79 episodes = 474 hours of my life spent watching the original Star Trek.

Now let's consider the later incarnations of the series. I make it 617 episodes of "Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager," and "Enterprise." I simply don't have the reps in on these shows. I gave up on about the last two seasons of Voyager, so score a big fat zero for those. I generally liked Deep Space Nine, but for most of those episodes, once was enough. I used to have a lot of Next Generation on VHS, so I have some reps in on those. My work and life schedule interfered with my seeing Enterprise as much as I would have liked, but I've caught most of them at least once. My ballpark guess is I've averaged 1.5 views of all these episodes, or 925 hours.


474 hours of the original plus 925 for the others, and throw in, say 80 hours or so with the animated series when I was a kid . . . let's just round it out to about 1500 hours of my life in dim rooms with the glint of "Star Trek" reflected in my eyeballs.

Out of those 1500 hours, let's today recognize hour number one. It's pretty hard for most of us to remember what it was like to discover "Star Trek" for the first time. But everyone who was tuned in to their local NBC channel on September 8, 1966, that's 45 years ago today, did just that. They were boldly going where no viewer had gone before.

The episode was "The Man Trap," written by George Clayton Johnson, who had penned a few episodes of "The Twilight Zone," many short stories, and would go on to co-author the novel "Logan's Run." One of my favorite old "Star Trek" books is "The Star Trek Compendium" by Allan Asherman (1981). I have a first edition copy of this book which, unlike later editions, lists the approximate shooting dates of each episode. Episode 12, "Miri" is shown as being filmed in "Late August 1966." It probably could have been through post-production by the September 8 original air date of "The Man Trap."

This gives us an idea of the episodes available for selection as the premier, which would be these:

"The Cage"

"Where No Man Has Gone Before"

"The Corbomite Maneuver"

"Mudd's Women"

"The Enemy Within"

"The Man Trap"

"The Naked Time"

"Charlie X"

"Balance of Terror"

"What are Little Girls Made Of?"

"Dagger of the Mind"

"Miri"

Was there a better choice than "The Man Trap?" Presumably the first two were not considered for the premier since they were "pilot" episodes and had different casting and a different look from the rest. Given the seemingly simpleminded nature of network executives, especially when dealing with the Sci Fi genre, my guess would be "The Man Trap" got the nod because it had a monster in it.

I think all 12 of these early episodes are good, but were I choosing a premier episode, I'd have narrowed it down to "The Corbomite Maneuver," "The Man Trap," and "The Naked Time." And I probably would have selected "The Naked Time." It has an ice planet, suspense, action (thanks in part to Sulu and his fencing foil) and is a story designed to give a good look into the nature of the main characters.

Which one would you have chosen?

Discuss . . .

Top Ten Sci Fi shows of all time - Conclusion

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Holding down the number one spot in the conclusion of the Childhood Recovery Project Top Ten Sci Fi Shows ever. . .

1: Battlestar Galactica (reboot) - Hands down. The. Greatest. Sci Fi. Show. Ever.

Those of you who may have been following this list as it developed know I put "Star Trek" at number two. It had a stranglehold on the top spot until a few short years ago. Once "Galactica" had a couple of seasons under it's belt, it took over the top spot, and no other choice even entered my mind for this position on this list.

Where the 1978 incarnation of "Galactica" was informed by the cold war and featured a faceless "evil empire" as the enemy, the 2004 reboot took it's influence from the "war on terror," and played with the fear that "the enemy could be anyone and they are living among us." This led to a far more complex textured canvas on which to build the story.

This show made lots of bold choices from the very beginning and never let up. With full knowledge that comparisons to the original were inevitable, there was all manner of messing with the original format. They gave one of the main characters a sex change, fer cryin' out loud. The African-American Boomer character from the original was changed to an asian female in an era where political correctness led to many shows being especially severely criticized for a lack of representation of people of color. And they even turned Boomer to a sleeper agent bad guy.

I love the look to this show. The set design is "contemporary aircraft carrier." At first, I found myself a little distracted and confounded by the defiance of my expectation of Sci Fi set design and the lack of smooth, angular walls and fixtures and slick, glossy touch screen instrument displays. The sight of obvious, unmodified contemporary equipment, such as the corded telephone handsets, for example were jarring in the beginning. But as the story got moving, this seemed to settle into the background (where it belongs) and allow the characters and story to be front and center.

Finally a space show had the smarts to “shoot hand held” in the space battle scenes. Instead of the smooth, sterile video game look of most CG special effects, Galactica gave us a view that truly feels like WWII wing camera footage. With any other Sci Fi show, when a special effects scene comes on, my brain compulsively begins to evaluate technique. Is it CG or physical models? How is it lit? For the first time, my brain jumped past that nonsense and just reveled in what it was like to actually be in space.

I liked this show for what it did not have as much as what it did. This is a Sci Fi show with no aliens. What a concept? Just because you are in space doesn't mean you can't tell a HUMAN drama without the distraction of latex rubber foreheads. Alien cultures in Star Trek and other shows are so often 2-dimensional and defined by one single character trait. Vulcans are logical. Klingons are warlike. Ferengi are greedy. Producer Ronald D. Moore could have redefined aliens (like the original show's Borellian Nomen) in the same way he redefined so many other aspects of Sci Fi storytelling in this show, but he made perhaps the wisest decision of all. "Lets just not have any stinkin' aliens."

Technology had little to nothing to do with this show. In fact, one of the primary characteristics of the title "character" is that the Galactica has no networked computers. This is the main reason she survived the initial Cylon attack, which involved a computer virus. The weapons in the show, both handheld and heavy/aircraft-based, fire conventional bullets. Super-duper highly explosive bullets, to be sure, but bullets nonetheless. There are no laser beams to take us out of the atmosphere of realism.

There were no mysterious galactic phenomena, energy beings, or (for heaven's sake) holodeck malfunctions to put the characters in some kind of cute jeopardy for one episode only. Somewhat related to that, there was no technobabble. The day was never saved by "feeding a phase modulated graviton neutrino pulse through through the tachyon flux inhibitors to restore primary plasma coolant flow to the dilithium crystal matrix." Don't get me wrong. I love Next Generation. But there were just too many times when they had a great story that took characters in exciting new directions, but they didn't have a good ending, so they resorted grim faces, bombastic music, a lot of incomprehensible dialog followed by a big'ol slap to the reset button.

And speaking of that, there is no reset button in "Galactica." If you're dead, you're dead. (Well, except for Cylon resurrection, of course.) No waking up in the shower and realizing it was all a dream. If you lose an eye or a leg, there are no cloned or cybernetic implant replacements. Other shows put characters in different roles just for one episode or for a short arc, but Lee Adama handed in his rank insignia in a heated exchange with his father in order to become defense council to the foremost traitor to the colonies. That could have been a short detour, but it became a permanent change. "Galactica" had enough hot shot pilots and needed to groom a few statesmen, so the change was made without a flinch.

I have trouble getting into the anti-hero type of characters depicted in shows such as "Breaking Bad" and "Dexter," but I really dig it when characters have a dark side. Pretty much every character in Galactica does both heroic things and deplorable things. A primary example of this is the character of Gaeta, portrayed by Alessandro Juliani. In the pilot movie, he is a young, enthusiastic, hyper-efficient officer, almost in the Wesley Crusher mold, but through a long story arc, he becomes bitter and bigoted and ultimately the lever for some of the most grievous atrocities depicted in the show. But in the end, his character is not purely evil, but tinged with tragedy.

There is similar complexity another major character, Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes). Clearly, there is an aura of heroism cast over her by the mere fact that she and her crew survived the Cylon massacre, but we are subsequently forced to confront whether the ends are justified by her means. Similarly, in the "New Caprica" arc, our heroes were forced to become in many ways the same kind of insurgents and suicide bombers we were finding so reprehensible in Iraq at the time.

I love a story that grabs me by the 'nads and makes me look at something from the other side.

I think very actor in this show was excellent, and Olmos, Bamber and Callis were SUPERLATIVE.

So, there's my Number One, and my primary reasons for choosing it. As mentioned in the Fusion Patrol podcast, there can be debate over the religion and mysticism depicted in the show, and many folks seem to take umbrage at the finale, which I found quite good. But all of that can be discussed in future posts, as this one has already gotten quite long.

Now, I suppose I do have to acknowledge something else: Dr. Frakkin' Who. Of the four of us taking this opportunity to publish top ten lists (Newsarama, Ben and Eugene from Fusion Patrol, and me), I'm the only one who doesn't have Dr. Who right at the top of the list, or anywhere on the list for that matter. When one's view is so apparently outside the mainstream an explanation is probably called for. So, in much the same way as I might have to explain why I, for hypothetical example, think powdered pig shit is good on corn flakes, I here briefly provide my take on Dr. Who: I just don’t get it. I’ve seen maybe 6 episodes of different vintages, so while I will grant that I may not have given it a fair shake considering it's inexplicably lengthy run, the fact is I never, ever saw one thing in Dr. Who that made me want to fight through another episode. Sorry.

Top Ten Sci Fi shows of all time - Pt. III

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Continuing the previous two day's posts, here are positions four thru two on my Top Ten Sci Fi Shows of All Time, in response to the Newsarama list and the Fusion Patrol Podcast.

4: Land of the Lost - It's very easy to dismiss this show simply because it was saturday-morning "KidVid." Even if you look past that, there's the campy over-broad acting and the jerky stop-motion dinosaur action and grainy blue screen chromakey compositing. But somebody smuggled some adults into the writers' room (like "Star Trek" veterans David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, Norman Spinrad, Walter Koenig, and Theodore Sturgeon, as well as noted SF literature authors Larry Niven and Ben Bova). The results in terms of storytelling were considerably above what should have been expected.

NBC probably would have been happy with any random stream of clips depicting third-rate actors being terrorized by dinosaurs, anything to put between the commercials for Sugar Smacks and GI Joe's with the kung-fu grip. But, for the first two seasons anyway, the producers trusted that pre-teen kids would tune in and actually REMEMBER what they learned in previous weeks about the rules and physics of the Land of the Lost. If you didn't remember that pylons control the weather, you might be lost a few weeks later when were looking at the pylon that controls gravity. This show gives kids a lot more credit than do modern offerings like, say, SpongeBob.

Special effects technology of the day was pushed past the breaking point, and to this day, I find it jarring to go back and forth between the videotape of the actors, and the stop motion film of the dinosaurs, but if the story is actually making you think a little bit, maybe those things aren't quite as noticeable. Every answer revealed about the Land of the Lost led to another question, not the least of which is why Holly didn't grow completely out of her costume after the first season. To my knowledge, there was no pylon that opened a doorway to K-mart.

You know, "Land of the Lost" would be a great premise for a movie. Who would play the father? Maybe Liam Neeson? Anyone but Will Ferrell. . .

3: Nowhere Man: - There was not room for both The Prisoner and Nowhere Man in my top ten. So I had to choose. When I first saw "Nowhere Man," I thought, "gee, this is a lot like "The Prisoner." There are subtle references to "Prisoner" throughout, and one episode, "Paradise On Your Doorstep," while not a shot-for-shot re-make of Prisoner Episode 1, ("Arrival"), would have fit right in with Patrick McGoohan's show from the 1960's.

I chose "Nowhere Man" because of it is more contemporary and because it is set in "the real world" rather than what is to US viewers an otherworldly landscape. I may also relate to Thomas Veil more than Number Six because Veil is, like me, a photographer. There is, however, an annoying continuity problem in that the producers couldn't seem to decide if Veil used a Canon F-1 or a Nikon FM-2. (I'm a devoted Canon guy now, but I admit I did once have an inappropriate relationship with a Nikon.)

Both shows deal with a man deprived of his personal identity. While Number Six is abducted from his natural environment and incarcerated in The Village, Nowhere Man's Thomas Veil is "erased," all traces of his identity are deleted and he is set adrift with only a single strip of negatives to prove he has ever lived and breathed in this world. Where Number Six was taken away from his life, Thomas Veil's life was taken away from him. This enabled Veil to move around in any environment, while Number Six was stuck in The Village, unless there was an unusual plot device at work.

There was a heavy X-files influence on Nowhere Man. The show was filmed in Vancouver, just like X-files, and a conspiracy, either by the government or possibly something else much more organized, is the center of the plot. Both shows also have atmospheric music by Mark Snow.

This was another one-season wonder, and while I'm sure the season closer was intended to be a cliff-hanger leading into a season two, it holds up surprisingly well as a series finale.

The DVD set for this show is unusually rich in special features and commentary, and I recommend adding it to your Netflix queue.

2: Star Trek - Two reasons this show rockets directly to the Number 2 spot. First, it was great during the 1960's as the first "adult Sci Fi" in a time of "adult westerns" and is still great almost five decades later if you just look past some dated-looking technology and dippy costumes. (Dave Barry once said the uniforms looked like pajamas.) Sure, there are some '60's clinkers, like the line in Turnabout Intruder about, "Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women." Obviously, at least in that one script, there was a failure to foresee the strides women would make in subsequent decades toward equality, but for the most part, considering these episodes are nearly 50 years old, the writing holds up tremendously well.

And second, without the enormous success of Star Trek, Sci Fi would possibly never again have gotten any kind of toe-hold on television. The track record of sci-fi failure through the 70's would almost surely have been death to the genre on TV if Star Trek had not been racking up killer numbers at the same time in syndication. Without the networks trying to re-capture this lightning in a bottle, we might never have had several of the shows on this and other top-ten lists.

Nobody put any of the other four Star Trek shows in the top ten, even though surely at least one of them would be worthy. Obviously, Star Trek could take five of the top ten, but in my opinion the other shows, while still good each in their own way, did not break significant new ground not already broken by the one that started it all. I feel the original series is by a significant margin the best of the bunch, but those who grew up in the 80's/90's instead of the 60's/70's like me often would put Next Generation at the top. It's generational. Deal with it.

Tomorrow: What else? The number one best Sci Fi show ever. The Fusion Patrol's Ben and Eugene ain't gonna like it.

Top Ten Sci Fi shows of all time - Pt. II

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Continuing yesterday's post, here are positions seven thru five on my Top Ten Sci Fi Shows of All Time, in response to the Newsarama list and the Fusion Patrol Podcast.

7: Land of the Giants - It doesn't seem right not to acknowledge Irwin Allen's contribution to the genre in tne 1960's. If for no other reason, he gets a tip of the hat for being (and someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong on this - I could very well be missing someone from overseas) the only producer other than Gene Roddenberry and Gerry Anderson to produce three Sci Fi programs that lasted two or more seasons. Of the three main Irwin Allen sci-fi series (excluding one season wonder "Time Tunnel," which I have never seen) this was the one that tried to be at least somewhat serious (which "Lost in Space" did not even attempt), but didn't take itself way MORE seriously than was earned by the storytelling, like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." The special effects were ambitious for the day and quite effective overall. This is my selection from the genre I call "60's camp."

6: Space: Above and Beyond - Top Ten spoiler alert: X-files is not in my top ten for much the same reason that Twilight Zone is not here. I consider X-Files more of an anthology type show than Sci Fi. Individual episodes were clearly Sci Fi, but the majority seemed to me to be much more fantasy or "magical realism." But Space: Above and Beyond can be thought of as what X-Files might have been as pure Sci Fi.

Produced by X-Files producers Glen Morgan and James Wong, "Space" has the conspiracy/mystery aspects that made the "mythology" episodes of X-files so captivating, but is firmly in the realm of Sci Fi with its future/space setting and cool space vehicles, aliens and 'splosions. Two major events in "history" were introduced in this show and very slowly drawn out and explored. There was the A.I. war, where human-built android slaves rebelled on their masters (hmmm. . .sounds familiar. . .), and in-vitros, artificially gestated humans who emerge from the tank ("womb") as physical adults with the minds of children destined to be grunt soldiers in the A.I. war. (Not surprisingly, they also rebelled.)

These two instances of human hubris are followed by colonization of another planet in the belief that we are alone in the universe. The massacre of this colony by a mysterious alien race is the start of the war that provides the show's backdrop. But are the aliens really so mysterious? Those corporate guys from Aerotech and certain individuals in the Earth government seem to know more than they are letting on. . .

Now the downtrodden in-vitroes refuse to fight for their human creators, and the A.I.'s, now exiled to space after losing the war (hmmm. . .sounds even more familiar. . .), are making common cause with the aliens. A gritty gung-ho marine war drama with well-drawn characters, there was a stunning cliff-hanger set up in the final episode of season one, a cliff-hanger that, unfortunately remains unresolved to this day.

Special effects early in the C.G. era don't hold up quite so well by today's standards, but the producers made the smart choice to keep the lighting dark on the space scenes, which is in keeping with the show's mood and mitigates the limitations of C.G. at the time.

5: Babylon 5 - There was at times a predictable sameness to the writing on this show, which is not surprising since the same guy wrote 90% of the episodes solo and shared credit on all the rest. Mr Straczynski should have relinquished the reigns from time to time to allow his own batteries to recharge and to let a different voice be heard from time to time. But Babylon 5, more than any other show I can think of, often captured the feel of the "golden age" of Sci Fi literature. I could see parallels to Asimov's Foundation series or the Rama books by Arthur C. Clarke.

Top Ten Sci Fi shows of all time

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The website Newsarama recently published a (rather baked) "Top 10 Sci Fi shows of all time" list. Ben and Eugene, the guys at the Fusion Patrol Sci Fi podcast (subscribe here) followed that up with a critique of the Newsarama list and their own Top Ten. Their list made a whole lot more sense. I recommend the Fusion Patrol podcast in general, but these two episodes in particular.

Here below, as the first leg of a planned four-part presentation of the Childhood Recovery Project, is the bottom three of my Top Ten. While I have my respectful differences with the Fusion Patrol list, I have only one (huge) disagreement. Check out the Newsarama list, the podcasts of the Fusion Patrol list, and my list and then discuss on the Fusion Patrol forum or on their twitter feed.

To wit. . .

While I try to make an objective case for most of my top ten, I am allowing myself subjective pics for positions 9 and 10. Bear with me.

10: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - I can already hear the howls of "that's not science fiction." Fair enough. But this show was solidly in the realm of science fiction for me with it's use of fanciful technology. Much of what was fanciful then is commonplace now. There were robotic arm manipulators, remote control flying saucers, gyro-controlled billiard balls in a rigged game of pool, computers able to defeat chess masters, felt on a poker table that could read the cards in a poker hand, and a computer that can't lose at Jeopardy.

OK. I made that last one up. But not really.

Mission: Impossible comes to my mind as sci-fi because for a couple of reasons peculiar to me. First, it was in an approximately six-month rotation with "Star Trek" as the post-Ten-O'clock news program on local TV station Channel 13 in Indianapolis in the '70's when I was growing up. I was always disappointed when Star Trek went on it's hiatus, but Mission: Impossible quickly grew on me as a worthy substitute. And, while this does not make it Sci Fi per se, Leonard Nimoy went directly from Star Trek to Mission: Impossible. He even appears to still be stuck in "Spock mode" in the first episode in which he appears. Watch his mannerisms in the "apartment scene" at the beginning of the Season 4 opener, "The Code." (That can be viewed on Netflix.) There is also the connection to "Space: 1999" in Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.

9: MAN FROM ATLANTIS - I haven't actually laid eyes on this show outside a few YouTube clips since the '70's, and I readily take the word of the Fusion Patrol Guys' that it sucks. But for all it's faults, in the drought of TV sci-fi in the '70's, this was a cool drink of water to a very thirsty kid. This is definitely a subjective pick on my part based much more on nostalgia and the impact it had on me at age 10 than any attempt on my part to evangelize for it and say, "You've GOT to see this." It was a show I very much looked forward to every week when it was originally on the air, though I am sure I would now find it extremely cringe-worthy now. One thing I will stand by, though, is that "Man From Atlantis" had great music. See my other post on the theme for this show by the late composer Fred Karlin.

(Incidentally, the only reason I ever found the Fusion Patrol podcast in the first place is because I did a search for "Man From Atlantis" in iTunes.)

8: SPACE: 1999 - First of all, let me acknowledge the bad, BAD science in this show. The moon traveling at hyper-light speeds? Randomly bumping into inhabited planets two dozen times a year? If the moon traveled at speeds necessary to reach a different solar system on average twice a month, it would zip by them so fast there would never be time for a story to develop. An attempt was made to explain this by introducing the concept of "Space Warps" in the second season, but it's still utterly preposterous to have the moon as a space vehicle.

I agree with the Fusion Patrol Guys that the first season was far superior to the second, and like them, I also admit I had the reverse opinion at the time the show first aired. But as a model nut, the great thing about this show for me is that it had more space ships on average per episode than pretty much any sci-fi show in history. Only the "Ragtag Fleet" of the original Battlestar Galactica can equal it. Martin Landau is superb as the Commander, and the special effects were low-tech, but very ambitious and mostly successful.

This show differs from Star Trek and many other shows in that mysteries are raised in many episodes and just not explained. This works with the setting in the near future (at least it was "future" in the 1970's) with the heroes becoming accidental space explorers before their time. They were fine tooling around the earth and moon, but just weren't ready for deep space. Episodes like "Collision Course" and "The Black Sun" emphasize how small we humans are in the context of the universe, and that there will simply be some shit out there that we never will understand.

TOMORROW: Positions 7 thru 5.