Believe it or not, not everyone is a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or any of its recent spinoffs.  For my money, though, if you refer to yourself unironically as “this reviewer,” you are a pretentious twat and your opinions can be safely disregarded.

I actually would kinda like to see that.

(Via Scans_daily, won’t you?)

Turns out I’m not the only one.  And it may not be physically possible, but this article neither sucks nor blows.

The good news, at least, is that that frees up much of the talent behind the DCAU to work on the series of direct-to-DVD animated movies that will begin dropping later this year. We’ve already seen the trailer for Superman:Doomsday, an adaptation of the ‘Death Of Superman’ storyline, and now, here comes the first trailer (that I’ve seen, at least) for the one I’m most excited about, the adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s “The New Frontier.”

Check it out behind the cut:

The fastest way to King Zilch’s heart is through the pre-crisis DC universe; you combine that with Cooke’s fantastic art and I’m one happy geek.

Incidentally, more on my love of Delicious Crack later.

Why is Edward G. Robinson on the cover of a Dick Van Dyke Show comic book?  Read the history of Penis Van Lesbian in comics, or skip ahead to when one man starts acting seriously weird.

Think about how different the Star Wars experience was in those days. There was so much still to wonder about. Would Luke get revenge on Darth Vader for killing his father? Would Princess Leia (and our 7-year-old selves could never remember if it was LAY-uh or LEE-uh) choose Luke or Han? We all knew that Star Wars 2 would be coming soon; would it be Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, or Han Solo at Star’s End?

And most importantly, who had the most Star Wars toys?

If your parents were really cool, you had all the figures (or as we called them, “Star Wars Men”), including Luke with the lightsaber that telescoped out of his arm, and you had a bunch of stormtrooper figures, and you kept them all in the Darth Vader carrying case, with the stickers for each figure, and the separate compartment for the guns, which would get lost anyway.

Me, I had a handful of figures, a couple of the diecast vehicles (not the gigantuous Millennium Falcon), and a big pile of non-posable, generic plastic spaceman figures that came in a clear plastic bag for a buck from Kmart.

I lived way out in the boonies back then, in envy of the people I would hear about who would go see the movie hundreds of times. In those pre-video days, that was possible because films stayed in theaters a lot longer, and indeed one theater in Tacoma played the movie continuously for over a year.

Without the interwebs, or the endless Expanded Universe novels and reference books, without home video, we had to get our fix in other ways, through the figures, or storybooks, or little film viewers that you hand-crank as you squint through a tiny eyehole and you would get to watch thirty seconds of the film.

But the absolute best way to get any information beyond the movies? Marvel’s Star Wars comics.

Marvel spent a full six issues adapting the movie; to put that in perspective, on the rare occasions these days when a movie is adapted in comics form, you’re lucky if they manage to cram the whole thing into forty-eight pages. The final edit hadn’t been locked in yet, so the adaptation included deleted scenes, including the legendary apocryphal arc of Luke’s friend Biggs Darklighter. Afterwards, the series flourished under writer Archie Goodwin, taking us across a galaxy vastly different from the one portrayed today. Goodwin presented characters and settings that seemed somehow perfectly in tune with the movie; the cyborg bounty hunter Valance, racing against Darth Vader with his own agenda for Luke Skywalker. The ambitious Orman Tagge, wealthy spice baron who took full advantage of having a high-ranking Imperial official for a brother. I still get a rush from the first page of issue 35, the moment things got a lot more intense. A closeup of Darth Vader, saying four words: “Tell me his name.” Followed by a tortured Rebel, off-panel, responding, “Luke Skywalker.” Vader had just learned the name of the pilot who destroyed the Death Star, and the next few issues were spent building to what we thought would be the first encounter between Luke and Vader – which turned out to be a big fakeout, priming readers for the real thing in The Empire Strikes Back.

Due to the lack of reference from Lucasfilm, and of any advance knowledge of the storyline, Marvel did get some things wrong. There were a few no-so-innocent kisses between Luke and Leia. There was a story where Luke learned that the planet he was visiting had previously been saved by three Jedi knights: Ben Kenobi, Darth Vader, and a young apprentice named Skywalker. Well, who knew? Oh, and then there was Jabba the Hutt:

Kinda close, right? At the time the adaptation was drawn, Jabba hadn’t been designed yet, and since the scene was scrapped, Jabba wouldn’t be conceptualized until Return Of the Jedi. So Marvel picked a reference photo of a background alien from the cantina scene, and that became Jabba. This version even reappeared in a later issue.

Understand, that I’m not a Lucas-basher. I didn’t hate Episode 1, and I think Jar Jar Binks is a valid character, just poorly executed. But Star Wars c. 1977-78, compared to today, is a very different experience, heavy with infinite possibilities, that burrowed into our imaginations to an unprecedented degree. Look, we were hooked at six years old; compared to the imagination of a six-year old, can anything that came after help but be a disappointment?

You may recall the effectiveness of towels from the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

International Towel Day was instituted in 2001, just after the May 11 death of Douglas Adams. I had thought it was a one-time event, and didn’t learn until 2005 that is was annual, meaning that for three years I was an unhoopy non-frood who did not know where his towel was.

I was first exposed to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy when I was ten, when I tuned into the local NPR station expecting an episode of the Star Wars radio series and instead got the first episode of Hitchhikers. At the time it was too much for me, all these weird voices and sound effects, with no frame of reference for me. But even at that tender age I was drawn to weirdness (and it seemed similar to Monty Python, which was becoming an addiction for me) so when the TV adaptation showed up on the local PBS station, I checked it out.

Adams writing quickly became an obsession for me, with turns of phrase like the Vogon ships being described as hanging in the air, “the same way that bricks don’t.” The absurdity of 42 being the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” appealed to my budding sense that we were all the victims of a cosmic joke. I devoured the books (only two at the time; the increasingly tedious “book five of the trilogy” jokes hadn’t started yet), savoring the language and the ideas, even as the plots completely failed to make any sort of sense to me. To this day, words and quotes from his books still pepper my conversations; why say “what the fuck” when “what the hemorrhaging fuck” sounds so much more descriptive?

As I grew up, I continued to consume anything I could get my hands on, though in the end, thanks to the man’s legendary procrastination (“I love deadlines – I love the whooshing sounds they make as they go by”), that wasn’t much. I loved the first Dirk Gently novel, especially after I had the crucial plot point – that Coleridge never wrote the second part of his poem – explained to me. Through Douglas Adams, I have a better (though still woefully incomplete) understanding of quantum theory, physics, and mythology. He was an atheist, which I’m not, but he made a better reasoned argument for it than anyone else I’ve seen.

My favorite work remains his 1991 nonfiction book Last Chance To See, a chronicle of his travels with nature photographer Mark Carwardine to witness various endangered species before it was too late. His descriptions of the flightless Kakapo parrot of New Zealand are priceless:

“Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the Kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly.”

This is followed by a description of the Kakapo’s nearly self-defeating mating cycle, which is absurd enough not only to make one believe that there is a Creator, but that that Creator seriously has it in for the Kakapo:

“…the mating rituals of the Kakapo are incredibly long and drawn-out, fantastically complicated, and almost totally ineffective. The male Kakapo…finds himself a rocky promontory, overlooking a vast, wonderful valley, and it hollows out this bowl in the ground…it puffs out these two enormous airsacs in its chest…(the mating call) is so deep and so reverberant…it carries vast distances, the long, slow big wavelengths fill the valleys…that you can’t tell where it’s coming from. So just imagine, supposing there are some female Kakapos out there, which there probably aren’t. And supposing they like the sound of this booming, which they probably don’t. Supposing that they can then find where this is coming from, which they probably can’t. If they overcome all those obstacles, and actually find the male Kakapo…the female Kakapo will lay one single egg every two years, which promptly gets eaten by a stoat or a rat, and you think, how the HELL has this stupid creature lasted this long?”

Last Chance To See is at its most hilarious when tinged with sadness, for the plight of the animals, for the absurdity of the situations they found themselves in, for a human race that allowed things to get to this point. The expeditions (undertaken between 1985 and 1988) had a profound effect on Adams, leading in his later years to a deeper interest in natural history. You can read updates on the animals at Another Chance To See.

I feel bad about not having my towel with me for the last few Towel Days, but I do have this anecdote from Neil Gaiman to assuage my guilt:

“My favorite memory of Douglas was when I was doing a Hitchhiker’s Guide companion. When I was in his office, going through his filing cabinets and looking at BBC scripts and so on and so forth—all the Hitchhiker material. His mother had come to stay. She’d gone off and had a bath. And all of a sudden there was a banging on the door. And she was shouting, “Douglas, Douglas, I can’t find a towel.” Douglas was walking around the house, looking for a towel. I said to him, “There’s a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy moment for you.” And he said, “Don’t you dare put that into the book.” I loved the idea, that Douglas Adams was walking around unable to find his towel.”

Here’s a rare clip of an episode of the British Cartoon Dr. Snuggles written by Adams and John Lloyd.

Next: Gee, what else happened on May 25th?

In the late 90s, I hosted The Movie Geek Show on Seattle Public Access TV. During one early episode, we were discussing what we considered the most essential movies of the last 20 years, and soliciting viewers opinions on same. This being 1996, our choices included such decidedly lowbrow faire as Highlander, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the Star Wars trilogy. One caller cheekily noted our addiction to what she called “J-U-N-Q-U-E.”

So what is Junque? The easy answer would be to say, “it’s my site, so Junque is whatever I say it is.” So let’s start with that. Junque is lowbrow with a high IQ. Or it’s smart made stupid. It’s a bad monster movie, made with exquisite talent and skill. Or it’s something great, turned face-meltingly bad. Or it’s something boring and mediocre, that’s given that cracky twist to make it a total WTF experience.  Happy Days is not Junque, but this is:

And that’s Junque. The best of the worst, the worst of the best. And best of all, it’s my site, so Junque is whatever I say it is.

- King Zilch