Tron 1918: Recognizers On The Western Front

Imperial German Forces Confronted By Technological Progress

We tend to romanticize old weapons.  That’s why swords and armor end up in museums, and we make museums out of warships.  Heck, let’s dig up the Yamato from the bottom of the ocean, put a wave motion engine (ha dooooooo) in it, send it into outer space and use it to fight the Gamilons?  Oh, yeah, that’s right, Dr. Robert Ballard–Super Underwater Wreckage Finder Dude–found the thing, basically ripped in to two pieces, so ya can’t tunnel up innit and put in the engine.  Or the Gun.  Darn.  I have to thank my friend Vince for pointing this out and wrecking all my childhood dreams of fighting blue-skinned aliens with massive bursts of stored tachyons while wearing my space sunglasses.  And white bell bottoms.  With red stripes. 

Anyway, Star Blazers is not unusual, a lot of sci-fi is about war.  Among the stars.  Star…Wars.  Get it?  Wars are about weapons.  Death… Star.   Light…Saber.   It’s only logical to wonder what would happen if new weapons were taken back to old wars.   In fact, that’s the whole premise of a movie called The Final Countdown (not to be confused with the sci-fi hair metal epic by Europe), in which the (then-1980) modern supercarrier USS Nimitz in sent back in time to 1941, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor.  It’s a moral dillema, change history, or not?  Bah.  The real question is: what if the Triple Entente had recognizers and light cycles from Tron during World War I?  Sark would clean up the Kaiser.  No doubt.

Pineapple: Vader’s Other Sad Devotion

Sith Lord Harshes Detractors of Adequate Nutrition For Cybernetic Organisms

What the heck does Darth Vader eat anyway?  It’s tempting (but mean) to imagine he subsists on a diet of lager and barbequed ewok (with extra ewok sauce).  Anakin never seemed to show much preference, and if you invited him to your wedding, you’d still be stumped until you got the card back.  (“What’s it gonna be, chicken…or steak?  Chicken, or steak?  Come on boy, I can wait all night….”  Maybe, like Dr. Frankenfurter from Rocky Horror, he prefers Meatloaf….) 

Anyways, I always think of that poor Imperial Officer who harshes Vader’s force powers as a “sad devotion” to an “ancient religion”.  Sheesh, everyone’s a critic.  It sort of begs the question, though.  Does Vader have any other sad devotions?  Like Beanie Baby collecting, or maybe backgammon?  (Hey if you’re into those things, cool.  You’re not an evil Sith Lord.  If you were, it would be sad.  You’d have more important things to do, like trying to turn your offspring to the dark side.)

Mr. Hand Receives The Harshness

Psychic Urban Architect Harshes Alien Squid-Brained Sociologists

Every night, the Strangers erase our memories, implant new ones, and restructure our lives as well as our city through their ability to “tune” reality to whatever they desire.  They have cool taste in vintage cars.  But life in Dark City is just one big experiment. John Murdock also discovers that he has this ability to tune, and wakes up out of his false reality to control his own destiny (no, he doesn’t become Steve Vai’s guitar tech.  Steve has his own tuner.).  A slobbering, wheezing Keifer Sutherland and a smokin’ Jennifer Connoly accompany said fish-eyed dreamer (played by Rufus Sewell) on his noir psychedelic road trip to find Shell Beach.  Which doesn’t exist, of course, until he makes it.  What kind of allegory would it be otherwise?  All the while, he is pursued by the Strangers–Mr. Hand, Mr. Book, & co., who are basically a kind of space squid living in a zombie corpses.   They wear black all the time and listen to Depeche Mode.  Okay, not really.  But they should.  They dress like they should.

A cool psychic battle wraps things up as John finds his inner Jedi, and hey, it’s a lot better than the psychic battle at the end of Harmageddon (then again, what isn’t?  A psychic battle between Col. Sanders and Walt Disney–neither of whom, to the best of my knowledge, have psychic powers–would be better than the psychic battle at the end of Harmageddon.)  A sequel is rumored.  Not to Harmageddon, that would suck.  Well, at least, people could walk around yelling “Genma is Coming” over and over.  Again.  No, a sequel to Dark City.  Yea for Murdoch to recapture his dream mellow.  Don’t harsh on the dream mellow. Dude. Why.

Bender At Hogwarts

Time Travelling Robot Eradicates Magical Messenger Birds

Owls: useful couriers or scourge of the year 3000?  Well, the Muggles of New New York certainly have no use for them.  It’s a running joke in the background of Futurama that owls have replaced pigeons as the most common avian pest.  Yet they serve the folk at Hogwarts so well in our time, or whatever timeless time it’s supposed to be in Potterland (technically, there are more Weasleys….shouldn’t it be Weasleyland?  A Weasleyverse? Anyway, there’s a lingering sense that the Potterverse takes place in the 70s or 80s, because there’s just not enough body piercings among the student population to make us believe otherwise.)

Bender, the sarcastic, hard-drinking, fun-loving Planet Express delivery crewman, is send back in time to steal all the precious artifacts in history by a bunch of clothing-optional aliens in Bender’s Big Score.  This leads to multiple copies of said droid arriving at a simultaneous point in the future, creating temporal paradox.  So maybe he stopped by Hogwarts in nineteen-whatever to pick up a Hoarcrux or two, and happened to notice the avian pest infestation along the way.  Poor Errol. Poor Hedwig. Poor Fawkes the Pheonix…I wonder how many times he had to respawn before Bender figured it out?  Probably depends on how much Old Fortran Malt Liquor he brought along…or how many times Bender played that classic 1980s arcade shoot-’em up, you know, the one with the fiery birds from outer space….

The new self-help fad sweeping the Galaxy.

Celebrity Speaker Extolls Virtues of Arcane Weaponry As Motivational Metaphor

May the Glaive be with you. Always. You know you’ve tried to use The Force. C’mon, just admit it. Reached out your hand and focused with all of your might on lifting your toy X-Wing out of a muddy puddle in the backyard when no one was looking. The Glaive, a cross between a boomerang, shuriken and a pocket knife/switchblade, was a unique weapon wielded by Colwyn, the Errol-Flynn-meets-Luke-Skywalker King of planet Krull, using Force-like techniques to control it.

Krull, the fantasy/sci-fi movie from 1983, always seemed like one part Star Wars, one part Lord of the Rings (though, I guess back then I wouldn’t have made the LOTR reference. Maybe more like classic Robin Hood films – not the Kevin Costner/Bryan Adams chickflick). You know, Hero’s Journey/Joseph Campbell stuff. Or maybe they just copped that medieval episode from classic Galactica (the one where Starbuck teaches all of those blonde pre-Narnia kids how to storm a castle while singing a song to remember their strategy). Hey, come to think of it, The Empire Strikes Back was sort of like the Ice Planet Zero BSG episode (man, those Oliva Newton-John wannabe clones were glacier-melting hot). Not sure which came first in that case, and too lazy to Wiki it today. And that whole Firefly series was kinda like the cowboy Galactica episode (Red Eye the cylon RULED!). Hey, it’s all good – it just always made sense that EVERY sci-fi franchise should have an ice planet episode, a western-in-space episode, a medieval-in-space episode, etc. It’s just what you do.

Watching Krull again recently, I realized how all of the various situations that test Colwyn in his quest to save Princess Lyssa from the evil Beast could be translated into a self-help program encouraging positive thinking, building confidence, etc. Colwyn is just such a hyper-positive dude. In the end, when your Glaive is stuck in the flesh of the hideous Beast and you can’t get it back, you’ve got to trust in yourself. Though there’s also that special fire the Princess gave you – you know, the fire that you can shoot out of your hand. That always helps, too.

– Nigel Matrix

The Final Fifth Cylon Is….

Mechanical Vegetable Extractor Revealed to Be Enemy of Humanity

There were only three old-school cylon models–centurian, IL series (the ones with the awesome disco heads) and the goat-faced, purple-afro’d Imperious Leader, who had this unexplainable obsession with sitting thirty feet high in the air under a mood light.   Purists will say, yes, a fourth humaniod model was added in Galactica 1980.  And the really obsessed will say, yes, there was a fifth “civilian” cylon model present at the Battle of Gamoray in “The Living Legend Part II”.  Fine.  But now there’s twelve cylons in the new series, and we don’t even know who they are.  They don’t even know who they are.   And after being off the air for what, 9 or 12 months, it’s hard to remember the ones that we did figure out.   But slowly it’s ramping up speed again.  Maybe it’s the fact that they keep saying “The Final Episodes” in the commercials…closure is a good thing.

Rampant speculation fueled the Internet regarding who the final fifth cylon was: Starbuck?  Apollo?  Roslin?  That smarmy lawyer dude?  Now the truth has been revealed, and it’s just somewhat of a “meh” revelation.  Meanwhile, a Cute Robot Movie From Disney swarmed out of Pixar land and took over western culture for a while.  Gee, let’s take Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, strand him on the Earth with mountains of garbage, and give him really, really sad eyes, like a puppy whose favorite chew toy just got taken away.  Oh, yeah, let him collect sporks, and maybe old lunchboxes.   And humanity is all fat and bloblike, cruising through space with all their needs taken care of.  (How did they do it without sporks and lunchboxes?!?!) Don’t get me wrong, Wall-E was beautifully animated and very, very well done, and if heavy-handed environmental moralizing is your thing, you might want to see it again.  Wall-E’s “girlfriend” is EVE, and automated vegetable extraction robot (and exemplar of the term “probe droid”) whose task is to see if the Earth can sustain life again.  EVE has a bit of a mean streak, though, and is a little too trigger-happy with her killer lasers.  Poor Wall-E, who has no weapons, is dating a ‘bot that could mop up the floor with him, despite the whole puppy-dog thing he’s got going on.  It’s the old “girlfriend with a black belt” syndrome.

When we come away from Nuevo Galatica, what lesson are we supposed to learn?  That blonde women are evil, they get inside your head, and there’s lots of them?  That your bald with a capital “B”, hard-drinking XO is really an evil robot with a thing for Dylan tunes, and that his wife is even eviller (is that a word?  is now…) cause she’s mean to the evil hard drinking friend you didn’t even know was a robot?    Or maybe it’s just that your tools shouldn’t think on their own.  Not even the ones you send to look for emerging plant life.  Or maybe…if you have a hard-driving executive officer who’s bald and also secretly an evil robot…send him to look for sporks and lunchboxes?

A gift from the outgoing President

They Live! A special pair of sunglasses discovered by pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper (essentially playing himself as a homeless man in the 1988 movie They Live by John Carpenter) allows him to see the terrifying truth behind who’s really running our government. Skull-faced aliens (hey, maybe they’re related to those Martians from Mars Attacks!) hide amongst us, disguised by a signal transmitted through our TVs. Subliminal messages permeate our media, ordering us to Obey, Consume, Marry and Reproduce – and declaring money to be our God. (Whoa… um, this is actually starting to sound, uh, real or something…).

Wouldn’t it suck to go through all that work to get to the point where you become President, hoping to do all kinds of good things for the country – end wars, fix education and healthcare, etc. – only to find out that everything is being run by skull aliens, or lizard people, or grays, or those dudes from the Hollow Earth. And now you’re on their payroll and you have to keep global warming increasing so the climate becomes more habitable for them. Or you have to keep quiet about that hybrid program (and we’re not talking about cars here…).

Time to chew some bubblegum and kick some… uh, check out the movie.

– Nigel Matrix

Dr. Hans Rienhardt’s Short-Lived Deli Job

Interplanetary Combat Robot Proves Mettle In Processing Lunchmeat

Well, if you’re gonna be a madman, who says you can’t make a mean cold cut?  Hans Rienhardt, villian of Disney’s 1980s sci-fi trek The Black Hole, managed a state-of-the-art food growing and processing facility onboard the U.S.S. Cygnus so that he could feed his army of mechanized humanoid workers.  He had to start somewhere, right?  He probably got the idea of mechanizing his crew from one of those automatic ordering systems you find nowadays when purchasing bulk lunchmeat products.  Please allow 35 minutes to complete your order of cybernetic slaves, thanks.

Of course, no one knew much about black holes in the 1980s.  We didn’t understand being compressed to a singularity, squished beyond jello squished.  We knew nothing about spagettification.   The only spagettification in the Disney cannon at that point happened during Lady and the Tramp, where both titular canines try to eat the same noodle and end up sucking face instead.  Not getting stretched into infinite thinness hitting the event horizon.  No one hazarded a guess that black holes lurked in the center of every galaxy, or that the universe was tuned to a really low Bb note.   All we knew was that red robots were cool, and that you could talk to them with ESP.   I bet you Honda’s already working on that somewhere right now.  But all you can think about is salami.

Brokeback Zardoz

Monolithic Stone Entity Contemplates Morality and Post-Apocalyptic Fashion

Zardoz speaks to you! 300 years in the future, a giant stone head floats around the wastelands of humanity, spewing guns and ammo from its mouth and ordering Brutals like Zed to “go forth and kill”. Though even the mighty Zardoz is not infallible, and being forced to watch Sean Connery (yes THE Sean Connery, as in James Bond 007) run around in his safety-orange skivvies for two hours may prove too much for anyone or thing to handle. Zardoz has one THING he considers to be EVIL above all else… this being a family website, you’ll have to google/youtube it for yourself…

– Nigel Matrix

The Apple Store, Bespin Mall

Enraged Cybernaut Bemoans Latest Technology

Ah, Lobot. Short for lobotomy? They say (in the Expanded Universe) that Lobot was some kind of criminal at one time, and he eventually wound up as an “indentured servant” to the administration of Cloud City. Forced to have cyber implants installed on his head and take orders directly into his brain, Lobot supposedly was a mute by that point. Oh well, I don’t really follow the EU much… seems like Lucas doesn’t really, either. If I recall correctly, in Episode III, there are some pilots wearing implants similar to Lobot’s on the Tantive IV – the familiar Blockade Runner, an Alderaanian vessel of Senator Organa. So would such a peaceful, highly democratic, poster-child-of-the-Rebellion planet such as Alderaan allow indentured servitude to exist? Hmm…

Oh well, mute or not, in the case of this comic, Lobot has reason to scream over the never-ending march of technology. Maybe he can get a refund if he writes to Steve Jabba of Apple Intergalactic, Inc.

– Nigel Matrix