Gabriel L. Helman 10/30/24 Gabriel L. Helman 10/30/24

Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40

Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but I’ll take an excuse to talk about it more.

To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an album—which was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio show—a 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.

Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocom’s style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.

(For the details on how the game actually got made, I’ll point you at The Digital Antiquarian’s series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)

These are two of my absolute favorite things—Infocom games and Hitchhiker—so this should be a “two great tastes taste great together” situation, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little less “peanut butter cup” and a little more “orange juice on my corn chex.”

“Book adaptation” is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you “wait” and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something “inspired by” rather than “based on.” Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.

By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving “the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacular—and not terribly dissimilar from Hitchhiker—Planetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.

The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthur’s house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adams’ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.

You play as Arthur (mostly, but we’ll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.

The game—or at least the first part—wants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.

The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you don’t need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.

Because, you see, you’ve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be “pills”, or “drugs”, or “tablets”, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is “buffered analgesic”. And look, that’s the sort of think that I’m sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type “buffered analgesic” really fast.)

And for extra gear-griding, the verb you’d use in reglar speech to consume a “buffered analgesic” would be to “take” it, except that’s the verb Infocom games use to mean “pick something up and put it in your inventory” so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.

The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read “I got the Babel Fish!”

The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that it’ll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.

What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldberg–style solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.

Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthur’s front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.

(The Babel Fish isn’t called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbert’s mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)

The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the “buffered analgesic” is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.

There’s also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you what’s in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if you’re not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.

Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoG’s sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or “quantum leap-style” jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versions—on board the battlefleet that Arthur’s careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.

This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.

As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beast’s victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the book’s joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.

As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimat—the thing that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, that’s three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.

There’s a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that you’re intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding “tea” and “no tea” at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.

The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocom’s usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didn’t play games got bought for them, and didn’t convert a lot of people.

In retrospect, it’s baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. It’s wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fiction–themed game designed for “junior level” difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their “Introductory” game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.

(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)

Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to “real” business software. The next year they “finally” released Cornerstone—their relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.

Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but it’s hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell “analgesic.”

As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains it’s name recognition. People who never would have heard the name “Zork” stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.

And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most people’s first—and only—encounter with an Infocom game, and that’s too bad, because it’s really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If you’re looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. I’d recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with “Zork” in the title.)

BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadn’t been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.

It’s still fun, taken on its own terms. I’d recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.

All that said, it’s easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, it’s so well designed, and it’s design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once you’ve played it it’s incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.

As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?

As an adult, what irritates me is that the game’s “questionable” design means that it’s impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still works—Star Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, it’s impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where I’d type something like “and that’s okay”, but in this particular case, I wish they’d tried to make it last a little harder.

As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his “Infocom Cabinet” to the Internet Archive, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams

Gabriel L. Helman 10/16/24 Gabriel L. Helman 10/16/24

Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor

I missed it with everything else going on at the time, but this past August marks ten years since the debut of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor Who, who is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite version of the character.

His take on the character boiled down to, basically, “Slightly Grumpy Aging Punk Space Dad”, and it turns out that’s exactly what I always wanted. Funny, weird, a little spooky, “kind” without necessarily being “nice”. If nothing else, the Doctor should be the coolest weird uncle possible, and, well, look at that picture! Perfection.

(This is a strange thing for someone who grew up on PBS reruns of Tom Baker to admit. But when I’m watching something else and wishing the Doctor would show up and kick things into gear, it’s now Capaldi I picture instead of Baker.)

Unlike some of the other versions of the character, Twelve took a little while to dial in. So it’s sort of appropriate I didn’t remember this anniversary until now, because this past weekend was the 10th anniversary of the eighth episode of his inaugural series, “Mummy on the Orient Express.” “Mummy” wasn’t the best episode of that season—that was easily “Listen” or “Dark Water”, but “Mummy” was the episode where I finally got what they were doing.

This is slightly embarrassing, because “Mummy” is also the most blatantly throwback episode of the year; it’s a story that could have been done with very few tweaks in 1975 with Tom Baker. The key though, are those differences in approach, and one of the reasons a long running show like Doctor Who goes back and revisits old standards is to draw a contrast between how they were done then vs now.

Capaldi, unlike nearly all of his predecessors, was a genuinely well-known actor before climbing on board the Tardis. The first place I saw him was as the kid that falls in love with the (maybe?) mermaid in the criminally under-seen Local Hero. But his signature part was Malcom Tucker in The Thick of It. The Thick of It is set “behind the scenes” of the British government, and is cut from the British comedy model of “everyone is an idiot trying to muddle through”. The Thick of It takes that model one step further, though, and posits that if that’s true, there must be a tiny group of non-idiots desperately keeping the world together. That’s Malcom Tucker, nominally the government’s Director of Communications, but in reality the Prime Minister’s enforcer, spin doctor, and general Fixer. Tucker is clearly brilliant, the lone competent man surrounded by morons, but also a monster, and borderline insane. Capaldi plays him as openly menacing, but less straightforwardly malevolent as just beyond caring about anyone, constantly picking up the pieces from the problems that the various other idiots in Government have caused. Capaldi manages to play Tucker as clearly always thinking, but it’s never clear what he’s actually thinking about.

Somehow, Tucker manages to be both the series main antagonist and protagonist at the same time. And the character also had his own swearing consultant? It’s an incredible performance of a great part in a great show. (On the off chance you never saw it, he’s where “Omni-Shambles” came from, and you should stop reading this right now and go watch that show, I’ll wait for you down at the next paragraph.)

So the real problem for Doctor Who was that “Malcom Tucker as The Doctor” was simultaneously a terrible idea but one that was clearly irresistible to everyone, including show-runner Steven Moffat and Capaldi himself.

The result was that Capaldi had a strangely hesitant first season. His two immediate predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, lept out of the gate with their takes on the Doctor nearly fully formed, whereas it took a bit longer to dial in Capaldi. They knew they wanted someone a little less goofy than Smith and maybe a little more standoffish and less emotional, but going “Full Tucker” clearly had strong gravity. (We’ve been working our way on-and-off through 21st century Who with the kids, and having just rewatched Capaldi’s first season, in retrospect I think he cracked what he was going to to do pretty early, but everyone else needed to get Malcom Tucker out of their systems.)

Capaldi is also an excellent actor—probably the best to ever play the part—and also one who is very willing to not be the center of attention every scene, so he hands a lot of the spotlight off to his co-lead Louise Coleman’s Clara Oswald, which makes the show a lot better, but left him strangely blurry early on.

As such, I enjoyed it, but spent a lot of that first season asking “where are they going with this?” I was enjoying it, but it wasn’t clear what the take was. Was he… just kind of a jerk now? One of the running plot lines of the season was the Doctor wondering if he was a good man or not, which was a kind of weird question to be asking in the 51st year of the show. There was another sideplot where he didn’t get along with Clara’s new boyfriend which was also unclear what the point was. Finally, the previous episode ended with Clara and the Doctor having a giant argument that would normally be the kind of thing you’d do as a cast-member was leaving, but Coleman was staying for at least there rest of the year? Where was all this going?

For me, “Mummy” is where it all clicked: Capaldi’s take on the part, what the show was doing with Clara, the fact that their relationship was as toxic as it looked and that was the point.

There are so many great little moments in “Mummy”; from the basic premise of “there’s a mummy on the orient express… in space!”, to the “20s art deco in the future” design work to, the choice of song that the band is singing, to the Doctor pulling out a cigarette case and revealing that it’s full of jelly babies.

It was also the first episode of the year that had a straightforward antagonist, that the Doctor beat by being a little bit smarter and a little bit braver than everyone else. He’d been weirdly passive up to this point; or rather, the season had a string of stories where there wasn’t an actual “bad buy” to be defeated, and had more complex, ambiguous resolutions.

It’s the denouement where it really all landed for me. Once all the noise was over, the Doctor and Clara have a quite moment on an alien beach where he explains—or rather she realizes—what his plan had been all along and why he had been acting the way he had.

The previous episode had ended with the two of them having a tremendous fight, fundamentally a misunderstanding about responsibility. The Doctor had left Clara in charge of a decision that normally he’d have taken; Clara was angry that he’d left her in the lurch, he thought she deserved the right to make the decision.

The Doctor isn’t interested in responsibility—far from it, he’s one of the most responsibility-averse characters in all of fiction—but he’s old, and he’s wise, and he’s kind, and he’s not willing not to not help if he can. And so he’ll grudgingly take responsibility for a situation if that’s what it takes—but this version is old enough, and tired enough, that he’s not going to pretend to be nice while he does it.

He ends by muttering, as much to himself as to Clara, “Sometimes all you have are bad choices. But you still have to choose.”

And that’s this incarnation in a nutshell—of course he’d really rather be off having a good time, but he’s going to do his best to help where he can, and he isn’t going to stop trying to help just because all the options are bad ones. He’d really rather the Problem Trolly be going somewhere nice, but if someone has to choose which track to go down, he’ll make the choice.

“Mummy” is the middle of a triptych of episodes where Clara’s world view fundamentally changed. In the first, she was angry that the Doctor expected her to take responsibility for the people they came across, here in the second she realized why the Doctor did what he did, and then in the next she got to step in the Doctor’s shoes again, but this time understood.

The role of the “companion” has changed significantly over the years. Towards the end of the old show they realized that if the title character is an unchanging mostly-immortal, you can wrap an ongoing story around the sidekick. The new show landed on a model where the Doctor is mostly a fixed point, but each season tells a story about the companion changing, sometimes to the point where they don’t come back the next year.

Louise Coleman was on the show for two and a half seasons, and so the show did three distinct stories about Clara. The first two stories—“who is the impossible girl” and “will she leave the show to marry the boring math teacher”—turned out to be headfakes, red herrings, and actually the show was telling another story, hidden in plain sight.

The one story you can never tell in Doctor Who is why that particular Time Lord left home, stole a time capsule, and became “The Doctor”. You can edge up against it, nibble around the edges, imply the hell out of things, but you can’t ever actually tell that story. Except, what you can do is tell the story of how someone else did the same thing, what kind of person they had to be ahead of time, what kinds of things had to happen to them, what did they need to learn.

With “Mummy”, Clara’s fate was sealed—there was no going back to “real life”, or “getting married and settling down”, or even “just leaving”. The only options left were Apotheosis or Death—or, as it turns out, both, but in the other order. She had learned too much, and was on a collision course with her own stolen Tardis.

And standing there next to her was the aging punk space dad, passing though, trying to help. My Doctor.

Both Moffat’s time as show-runner and Capaldi’s time as the Doctor have been going through a much-deserved reappraisal lately. At the time, Capaldi got a weirdly rough reaction from online corners of the fanbase. Partly this was because of the aforementioned slow start, and partly because he broke the 21st century Who streak of casting handsome young men. But mostly this was because of a brew of toxic “fans”, bad-faith actors, and various “alt-right” grifters. (You know, Tumblr.) Because of course, this last August was also the 10th anniversary of “GamerGate”. How we ended up in a place that the unchained Id of the worst people alive crashed through video game and science fiction fandoms, tried to fix the Hugos, freaked out about The Last Jedi so hard it broke Hollywood, and then elected a racist game show host to be president is a topic for another time, but those people have mostly moved the grift on from science fiction—I mean, other than the Star Wars fanbase, which became a permanent host body.

The further we get from it, the more obvious what a grift it was. It’s hard to describe how how utterly deranged the Online Discourse^TM was. There was an entire cottage industry telling people not to watch Doctor Who because of the dumbest reasons imaginable in the late twenty-teens, and those folks are just… gone now, and their absense makes it even more obvious how spurious the “concerns” were. Because this was also the peak “taking bad-faith actors seriously” era. The general “fan” “consensus” was that Capaldi was a great actor let down by bad writing, in that sense of “bad” meaning “it wasn’t sexist enough for me.”

There’s a remarkable number of posts out there what’s left of the social web of people saying, essentially, “I never watched this because $YOUTUBER said it was bad, but this is amazing!” or “we never knew what we had until it was gone!”

Well, some of us knew.

I missed this back in November, but the official Doctor Who magazine did one of their rank every episode polls on the advent of the 60th anniversary. They do this every decade or so, and they’re always interesting, inasmuch as they’re a snapshot of the general fan consensus of the time. They’re not always a great view on how the general public sees this, I mean, a poll conducted by the official magazine is strongly self-selecting for Fans with a capital F.

I didn’t see it get officially posted anywhere, but most of the nerd news websites did a piece on it, for example: Doctor Who Fans Have Crowned the Best Episode – Do You Agree? | Den of Geek. The takeway is that the top two are Capaldis, and half of the top ten are Moffat’s. That would have been an unbelievable result a decade ago, because the grifters would have swamped the voting.

Then there’s this, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while now. Over in the burned-out nazi bar where twitter used to be, a fan of Matt Smith’s via House of the Dragon found out that he used to be the lead of another science fiction show and started live tweeting her watch through Doctor Who: jeje (@daemonsmatt). She’s up through Capaldi’s second season now, as I type this, and it’s great. She loves it, and the whole thread of threads is just a river of positivity. And even in the “oops all nazis” version of twitter, no one is showing up in the comments with the same grifter crap we had to deal with originally, those people are just gone, moved on to new marks. It’s the best. It’s fun to see what we could have had at the time if we’d run those people off faster.

This all feels hopeful in a way that’s bigger than just people discovering my favorite version of my favorite show. Maybe, the fever is finally starting to break.

Gabriel L. Helman 5/20/24 Gabriel L. Helman 5/20/24

Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25

Star Wars absolutely peaked just a hint after midnight, the morning of May 19, 1999.

It’s almost impossible to remember now how excited everyone was. And by “everyone” I don’t mean “nerds” or “fans” or whatever, I mean everyone. The monoculture hadn’t splintered yet, and “new Star Wars” was an event. Everyone talked about it, Natalie Portman’s kabuki-makeup face was everywhere, they ran that Darth Maul Duel of the Fates music video on MTV constantly.

The other thing that’s hard to remember is that “Star Wars” meant something totally different there in the spring of 1999. “Star Wars” was three good movies, and… some books and video games, maybe? But as far as the mainstream was concerned, it was just three movies that mostly everyone liked. For a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, Star Wars was still the gold standard, it was still the second highest grossing movie of all time, having only just been beat out by Titanic two years earlier. There was a tremendous amount of cultural good-will there—you don’t stay the highest grossing movie of all time by being outside of the mainstream. There were plenty of people who didn’t like it, but there were very few people who hated it. It was like the Super Bowl, or the World Series; the default cultural response was “yeah, those were pretty good!”

“Star Wars” was also a shorthand for quality. “Star Wars” movies were good movies, full stop, and “like Star Wars!” was about the highest compliment you could pay any live action action-adventure special effects anything.

And suddenly there was New Star Wars? That’s going to be amazing, by definiton!

And that trailer! We spent ages waiting for that trailer to download off the old Quicktime Trailers webpage over dialup. It was worth it.

It just genuinely didn’t occur to anyone that a new Star Wars might be bad. That just wasn’t a thing that happened.

Of course we all went to see it.

There was a big group of us that all went opening night, or rather the 12:01 am show the night before opening night. There was a bunch of us Star Wars fans, for sure, but half our group were casual at best. But it was a Thing! Everyone wanted to go.

This was before you could do this on the web, so we had to stand in line all day to get tickets. We worked out a rotation so no one had to stay there more than half an hour or so. The line outside the theature was basically a block party; everyone was in good spirits, the weather was gorgeous, someone brought a barbecue.

The little northern California town I was living in had the one Good Theatre—it was a remodeled vaudeville theature, single huge screen, lots of seats. Still had the old-style auditorium seating. The current owners had upgraded it with one of the best surround-sound systems I’ve ever heard.

The screening itself was a party. Everyone was there early, it was being “hosted” by the local radio station, and one of the DJs was MC-ing the scene, doing trivia, giving away prizes. Some people came in costume, but not a lot. This was’t a comic book convention thing, this was a bunch of regular people in a college town ready to watch a new movie that everyone knew was going to be great.

I swear this is a true story: I remember one of my friends, one of the not-so-much-a-fan ones, leaning over and asking me “what are all these nerds gonna do if the movie is bad?” She nodded her head towards the group of fans that did come in costume. Someone had a full Boba Fett outfit, which was not common in those days.

I wish I could remember what I said back. I think I made a crack along the lines of “I think they could just run that trailer a dozen times and everyone would be happy.” But it wasn’t a scenario worth thinking about. A bad Star War? No.

There had been rumblings of course. The reactions on what passed for the web in those days were… not an enthusiastic as one would have expected.

At midnight, the lights went out, and the audience roared. 12:01. Logos, then STAR WARS with that theme music. The audience made a sound I have never heard before or since, just an absolute roar of delight.

Then, that sound cut itself off very quickly, because suddenly everyone had to read a bunch of text we had never seen before.

I had another friend who was convinced that “Phantom Menace” was a fake title, and the real movie would have a “better one”. I remember side-eying him as THE PHANTOM MENACE scrolled into view in those chunky yellow letters.

The audience never got that loud again. There was a weird vibe in the room as the movie kept not… being… good. I distinctly remember the moment where the old guy with the pointy beard on Naboo says “This can only mean one thing, invasion!” which was such a cool line in the trailer, but in the context of the business meeting it actually happened in, just kind of flopped onto the ground and bled out.

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking. “That lady on AICN was right.”

My other clear memory of that night was walking out into the street afterwards. It was 2-something in the morning. It was a warm northern valley night, so it was shorts and short-sleeves weather.

The mood as we walked out into the night was strange—not sad, or angry, or even disappointed, but confused. Like leaving the stadium after your team blew what should have been an easy game. What the hell happened?

Someone I knew but hadn’t come with waved to me across the street. “That was amazing!” he yelled. We both knew he was lying, but we both let it slide. My friend that had asked what the nerds were going to do had slept through the second half.

No one would ever use “it’s like Star Wars!” as a compliment ever again.

The Phantom Menace has aged strangely, and mostly to its benefit. It’s still a bad movie, but not a terrible one. The passage of time—and the way “blockbuster” summer genre movies have evolved past it—have made it easier to see what it did well.

For starters, having the Queen of a planet arrive at the Galactice Senate to deliver eyewitness testimony about an illegal invasion only to be shut down by the senator for the invaders saying, basically, “why would we let this evidence get in the way of our desire to do nothing lets form a committee”, hits in 2024 in a way it didn’t in 1999.

And that podrace still slaps. And not just the lightsaber fight, but the whole final 4-location battle is a pretty spectacular piece of action movie-making, the occasional “let’s try spinning” non-withstanding. Lucas is at his best when he’s throwing weird images on the screen: that shot of the gungans coming out the swamp contrasted with the robots unfolding, Darth Maul pacing behind the laser fence while Darkman meditates, the fighters swirling around the command ship. The old Star War sense of humor occasionally shines through: for example, the music swells, the big door opens revealing Darth Maul and his double-bladed sword; and then Natalie Portman side-eyes Liam Neeson and deadpans “we’ll take the long way.”

I haven’t become a Prequel Apologist, exactly, but the curve I grade it on has certainly changed over the last two-and-a-half decades.

There’s a class of “big noise” movies that have become the dominant form of blockbuster action—obviously fake environments, too much CG, PG-13 without being sexy or scary, filled with beautiful-but-bored actors visibly thinking about how they’re going to spend their paychecks as they spout what’s not really dialogue but just sort of shout quips past each other. Part of what we talk about when we talk about “superhero fatigue” are these enormously expensive live-action Saturday morning toy cartoons with nothing to say.

Part of why Phantom Menace got such a nuclear negative reaction was that it was such a surprise. Before, if a huge expensive AAA movie was bad, it was because it was a colossal screwup—your David Lynch’s Dune, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, Batman & Robin. Those happened every few years or so, and would be followed by years of axe-grinding, blame-shifting, and explainers about “what went wrong.” And sure, bad sequels happened all the time—mid-tier Roger Moore Bond movies, or Jaws 3, Superman IV, Star Trek V: the low budget, low effort cash-in sequel.

Instead, here was a huge expensive AAA movie, advertised to hell and back, and by all accounts the exact movie the people making it wanted to make, and it was still bad. That just wasn’t a category in 1999. Now, it’s the dominant form. In a world where they actually honest-to-god expected me to pay full price to see Thor: The Dark World, I can’t generate the energy to be too mad about the movie with the good lightsaber fight.

To demonstrate what I mean, and without getting drawn into a epistemological debate about what I might mean by “worse”, here is a list of big-budget AAA blockbusters that have been released since 1999 that, if I had to choose, I would choose to watch Phantom Menace instead of:

Any live action Transformers
Any of the three Hobbit movies
Prometheus
Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
About half of the Fast and the Furious sequels
That insane Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp as Tonto
John Carter
Honestly, about a third of the Marvel Movies. Well, maybe half?
Any of the live action DC movies other than Wonder Woman
The third Matrix
Any of the reboot “Kelvin Universe” Star Treks
The Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, which still makes me angrier than TPM ever did

Compared to all that, Darth Maul is high art.

On the one hand, saying a bad movie doesn’t seem so bad because other movies got worse is damning with the faintest of praise, but on the other hand, go look at that list again. Yeah, we’re grading on a curve here, and yes, Jar-Jar is terrible, but did you see Star Trek Into Darkness?

At the end of the day, The Phantom Menace was one reclusive billionaire’s deranged vision, unimpeded. Say what you will about Lucas, he basically paid for this movie out of his checking account, and it’s clear it was the exact movie he wanted to make. After decades of warmed-over lowest common denominator films by committees that have been sandblasted into nothing, one guy’s singular artistic vision starts to sound pretty good, no matter how unhinged it might have been. We need more movies where someone just gets a giant pile of money to make whatever the hell movie they want, not less. Even if they don’t always work out.

And, TPM kicked off a cycle of directors going back and revisiting their older work, which has been a mixed bag, but we got Fury Road and Twin Peaks: The Return out of it, which was more than worth it.

What does The Phantom Menace mean, two and a half decades later?

“Episode I bad” is still shorthand for “absolute trash fire of a movie”. And that night in 1999 was certainly the point where “Star Wars” stopped meaning “the only series with no bad movies” and started to mean “increasingly mid movies with breathtakingly diminished returns surrounded by the most toxic fans you can possibly imagine.”

But it has a strange staying power. There have been plenty of worse followups, sequels, and remakes, but those slide out of mind in a way that this hasn’t. No one still makes jokes about fighting Giant Spiders or “Nuking the Fridge”, but this movie has remained the Totemic example for “Terrible Followup”. To put that another way: No one liked Jar-Jar Binks, but a quarter-century later, everyone on earth still knows who that is.

Why does this movie linger in the collective consciousness like—if you’ll forgive the expression—a splinter in the mind’s eye? I think it’s because unlike most bad movies, you can squint and almost see the good movie this wanted to be. And the passing of time, and the wreckage of those other bad movies, have made it clearer what this one did right, how close it almost got. This isn’t a Blade Runner situation, there’s no clever edit that could fix this one, it’s too fundamentally misconceived in too many ways. But you can nearly feel there was a version of this movie made from almost the same parts that would have worked. You can imagine what a good movie with this cast and with these beats would look like. You can almost reach out and touch it.

And yet, the movie itself remains this terrible, beautifuly-made, stodgy thing. The sort of movie where you say to yourself, “it can’t possibly have been that bad, could it? We just didn’t like it.” And maybe you end up watching it with friends, or with your kids, or late at night on Disney+, and as it starts you think “no, this wasn’t that bad,” but sooner or later someone says “this can only mean one thing—invasion”, or Jar-Jar has a big idea, or someone asks The Junior Professional if she’s an angel, and you say “no, actually, it really was exactly that bad.”

There’s a scene towards the end of the first act that has ended up as my most-quoted line from all of Star Wars.

The heroes are escaping from Naboo on the Queen’s chromed-out starship. The Jedi are in the cockpit delivering stilted dialogue. At a loss for anything better to do, Jar-Jar wanders into the droid break room. As he enters, the R2-D2 and the other R2 units all wake up, and turn towards him, beeping.

“Hey boyos!” he exclaims.

I have five cats in my house, and whenever I walk into a room with more then one of them, they always pop their heads up and look at me.

“Hey boyos!” I exclaim.

Gabriel L. Helman 4/29/24 Gabriel L. Helman 4/29/24

Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Programming Note: Back in March/April of 2021, I wrote a review of the then just-released Snydercut of Justice League for [REDACTED, but a different REDACTED than last time]. I’m actually not a thousand percent sure this actually got published back then, but I’m putting it up here now for roughly its 3rd anniversary. I did a little cleanup, but mostly I left it as it was, three years ago. On an amusing personal note, writing this was one of the things that caused me to think “you know, I should really re-light the blog.”

So, #snydercut. The tl;dr is that by any reasonable metric it's a lightyears better movie than the theatrical Whedon version, and that it's absolutely a Justice League movie by the guy that made 300.

Is it any good, though?

There's something to be said for just raw, un-compromised artistic vision, and this is clearly the movie ZS set out to make, and dang did he ever make the heck out of it.

It's extremely Zack Snyder. The guy has a style, and this might be its apotheosis. If nothing else, he knows how to make stuff look cool, and every character has at least one moment where they're doing the coolest thing imaginable. If I'd had seen this at 15 I'd have lost my damn mind. And that's kind of the point—this is a 15-year old's idea of what cool and grownup is.

The whole thing operates at this level of just Operatic Pomposity. Extremely silly stuff is happening constantly, and the movie just plays it completely straight-faced, as if this was the most amazing stuff you have ever seen. I mean, SIXTEEN minutes into the movie, the literal greek god Zeus shoots a Jack Kirby character with lightning, and the movie shoots it like it’s the end of Macbeth.

And you can kind of see why. The "other guys" have established a brand for self-aware, slightly self-deprecating superhero movies, and you want to carve out a space where you don't look like an Avengers knock off. Problem is, the only space where this material can work other than "Robert Downey Jr smirking" is "as goddamn serious as possible", so they went with that, and it's hard to blame them. Well, and there's also a genuine audience of people who think Frank Miller is a genius non-ironically, and I'm glad those people got a movie for them.

Having the movie at full prescription strength is intersting, because all the bad ideas are still bad, but they're fully baked, and you can see where they were going with it.

It's almost boiling over with ideas it can't figure out how to land.

ZS knows instinctually that character conflict is interesting, but can’t figure out how that works. Instead, everyone settles into this kind of grumpy-surly mode, but never actually disagree about anything.

It keep gesturing at other, better movies. There's an absolutely lyrical scene where Barry Allen saves Iris West from a car crash in the middle of a job interview that both nails Barry's character as well as finally figuring out how to show The Flash's powers in live action. Wonder Woman stars in a 10 minute Indiana Jones movie with torches and secret doors and everything. There's a really neat sketch for a movie about Lois Lane and Martha Kent dealing with their shared grief over Clark's death, and exploring what it's like for the people who knew the real person when a famous person dies, and THEN, as soon as Lois decices to move on, Clark comes back to life.

Heck, I'd take any of those blown out to 90 minutes, no question. Still, abbreviated as these sketches are, they’re good!

But, theres at least two colossal conceptual screwups in the movie that even this version can't do anything about.

The first is trying to invert the Avengers model, and introduce everyone in this movie and then spin them off. It ends up as an amazing counter-example of how well put together the first Avengers really was. Consider: basically every speaking character—Heroes AND Villains—as well as the core McGuffin, had already been introduced, so all that movie had to do was remind the audience who everyone was and then say "oh no! this guy from that movie has teamed up with aliens to get that thing from that other movie!" And BAM, you get to start 2/3 into the story and just RUN. Justice League has to spend the first 120 minutes just explaining things so that the rest of the movie can even happen.

The second big screwup is trying to go for the Kirby Fourth World / New Gods / Darkside stuff in one gulp. There’s so much there, and this movie has to push most of it to the margins. The result is a movie where the actual bad guy only shows up right at the end and has no lines, while the rest of the time they fight his least-interesting henchman.

As kind of a bonus mistake, the movie picks up where BvS left off, which means a dead Superman, which means most of the middle of the movie is a speedrun of “The Search for Spock” but for Superman. And it’s massively irritating, because the emphasis is all in the wrong places. Literally no one on earth thought Superman was going to stay dead, and even less people thought that he was going to sit out a Justice League movie. So the Return of Superman stuff in the middle is never interesting, it just feels like padding in a movie that already has too much going on. One more sublot jammed in that could have easily been stretched out into it’s own story, or should have been left behind in the conceptual phase.

There were some things I really liked, though. As I alluded to earlier the way they represent the Flash by having him stay the same speed but having the rest of the world go into slow motion is absolute genius, a perfect fit for Snyder's slow motion fetish, and forehead-slappingly obvious once you've seen it. And even though Days of Future Past had done something similar with Quicksilver three years earlier, this movie keeps finding new ways to use the idea, and even the lighting, instead of being ridiculous, serves as a snazzy indicator that Flash speed has kicked in before you have time to process that the background has slowed down. The shot where he steps back and catches the batarang is brilliant, and was rightly the center of the trailer.

I basically loved everything they did with Wonder Woman? Great use of a great character.

I also like that they way they solve the “Superman is too overpowered" problem is to lean all the way into it, and just show him as being on a completely different level from everyone else. That shot when he's fighting the League, and Flash is running by the frozen slow motion melee, and then Superman's eye suddenly moves to follow Flash? That's one of the best things anyone's ever done with Superman in live action. And it almost makes the “Search for Superman” stuff work, because he operates less like a character and more like a bonus mcguffin—he’s the Death Star plans, and once the League has him back on his feet they’re in good shape.

But, here in 2021, the biggest ding on JL is that absolutely everything that this movie tries to do in terms of tone or content, Infinity War / Endgame does better. The way this movie tries to be all edgelord dark looks downright amateur hour in a world where the "goofy" superhero francise made a movie where the bad guy wins and half the main characters die, and then rolls silent credits in front of a stunned audience.

[TEMPORAL INTRUSION: Hi, Gabe from ’24 here.  The original version of this had a horizontal line marking a transition here, but I’m going to replace that with something a little more thematically appropriate and #helmancut my own review from 3 years in the future.

Obviously, this was all written before we knew they were going to finally put that cycle of DC movies out of their misery and hand the keys to the guy Disney accidentally fired over some tweets, or that Marvel was going to spend the next several years exclusively stepping on rakes they had carefully placed in front of themselves.  I’m on the record as saying I think “superhero fatigue” is really “bad-movie-with-assigned-homework fatigue”, but either way, it’s a real thing.  I agree with everything I wrote here, but after years of relentlessly bad superhero and superhero-adjacent movies, I wouldn’t have written all this in such an upbeat tone.  And also, I sorta failed to point this out before, but those last two Avengers movies weren’t that great either.  “Grimdark bummer-times serious” just isn’t a key superheros play well in.

What’s remarkable to me now is that in the spring of ’21, waiting out what we thought was the tail end pandemic and just before our fall plans were wrecked by the Delta variant, I still remembered enough about the theatrical JL that I could do a comparison without a rewatch; now, I’m not sure I could tell you anything that happened in any of those movies.  Honestly, the only part of either version of JL that I still really remember is that mini–Indiana Jones movie starring Gal Godot at the beginning.  With the entire exercise now in the rear-view mirror:  They should have done a lot more of that.

We now return to the spring of 2021.]

I may be slightly more interested in the practice of turning a "long bad movie" into a "shorter, less bad" movie than the average person, but I think it's fascinating to see this, the original, and compare it to what they shipped in 2017. It's clear what Whedon's marching orders were: "cut it down to two hours, and add jokes". And that first one is a hell of a thing. You can squint and see there's a decent 3 hour version of this with a really solid deleted scenes section on the DVD, but cutting out half the movie is going to require some serious restructuring. For starters, you gotta pick a main character. There's two obvious choices:

Cyborg is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the movie. He's the only character with an actual "arc" who ends the movie in a different place that he starts. There's a kind of neat story in there about moving through the stages of grief, learning how to deal with the cards life deals you, and then finding a new family and purpose. The problem is—and this is a darkly hilarious punchline after all the allegations and drama—it turns out Ray Fisher really can't act. He's utterly out of his depth the entire time, and is utterly unable to deliver what the movie needs him to. He seems like a neat guy who everyone likes, and he was clearly treated abominably, and Whedon is a garbage person, but cutting his part to the bone was clearly the right call. That guy has no business being anywhere near a big movie, much less anchoring one.

Fortunately, however, the actual main character of the movie is clearly Wonder Woman. All the critical decisions in the movie are hers, she's the one that figures things out and gets the big exposition, she's the only one that gets a side adventure at the beginning—she's even the only one that gets her own theme music. This is a fairly clear "Wonder Woman and the Justice League" cut where it sticks with her as a the spine as she figures things out and recruits a team; not unlike the way Steve Rogers stays as the spine of the first Avengers movie.

So Whedon, of course, cuts out all her scenes and shoots a bunch of new stuff to make Batman the main guy. And you can almost see the panic-logic here. Suicide Squad bombed, BvS got a much more tepid reaction than they were expecting, Wonder Woman wasn't out yet. Recentering the movie on the one DC character thats proven able to hold down a franchise is an easy call to make, and "this movie needs more Batman" is a seemingly safe choice. But damn, what a screw up. And then it gets all extra icky once you roll in all the stuff we now know about "Joss Whedon, Fake Feminist".

Were there better ways to spend that 70 million bucks? Probably. It it a great movie? Not really. This isn't a Blade Runner-style "good movie becomes great" recut, this a Heavens Gate-style "oh, it turns out they really weren’t incompetent".

I'm glad they did this though. Its easy to see why the cast was so disgruntled, and I'm glad we got to see the movie they signed up to make. As the various studios figure out what to do with their personal streaming services, I hope "original cuts" of movies becomes a thing. If nothing else, I hope this encourages Disney to drop the first version of Rogue One on Disney+, or even, dare I say it, the real Star Wars.

But you know what? We've all had our work fucked up by other people. I'm glad someone got to haul their real work back out the trash and say "no, I made THIS."

Gabriel L. Helman 4/8/24 Gabriel L. Helman 4/8/24

April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic

This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. I’m republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .

I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the area—according to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.

Cal Expo itself is a strange beast—a 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekend—RV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.

The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.

As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.

The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.

The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.

The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.

Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.

Gabriel L. Helman 3/23/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/23/24

We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!

Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:

Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.

(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)

Gabriel L. Helman 3/21/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/21/24

BSG, Fifteen Years On

It’s been called to my attention that the last episode of the “new” Battlestar Galactica aired fifteen years ago yesterday?

My favorite part of that finale is that you can tell someone whose never seen it that the whole show ends with a robot dance party, and even if they believe you, they will never in a million years guess how that happens.

And, literally putting the words “they have a plan” in big letters in the opening credits of every episode, while not ever bothering to work out what that plan was, that’s whatever the exact opposite of imposter syndrome is.

Not a great ending.

That first season, though, that was about as good a season of TV not named Twin Peaks has ever been. It was on in the UK months before it even had an airdate in the US, and I kept hearing good things, so I—ahem—obtained copies. I watched it every week on a CRT computer monitor at 2 in the morning after everyone else was asleep, and I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They really did take that cheesy late-70s Star Wars knockoff and make something outstanding out of it. Mostly, what I remember is I didn’t have anyone to talk about it with, so I had to convince everyone I knew to go watch it once it finally landed on US TV.

It was never that good again. Sure, the end was bad, but so was the couple of years leading up to that end? The three other seasons had occasional flashes of brilliance but that mostly drained out, replaced by escalating “what’s the craziest thing that could happen next?” so that by the time starbuck was a ghost and bob dylan was a fundamental force of the universe there was no going back, and they finally landed on that aforementioned dance party. And this was extra weird because it not only started so good, but it seemed to have such a clear mission: namely, show those dorks over at Star Trek: Voyager how their show should have worked.

Some shows should just be about 20 episodes, you know?

Gabriel L. Helman 3/18/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/18/24

Caves of Androzani at 40

As long as we’re talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of “Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davison’s final story as Doctor Who.

One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isn’t totally unusual—Bond does the same thing—but what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.

The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can “regenerate”, healing themselves but changing their body.

This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Who—stories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. “Regeneration Stories” tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something “really extra bad” is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And they’re always deeply unsatisfying, because it’s always the sort of problem that wouldn’t be that big a deal if the main actor wasn’t about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.

Except once.

In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as “fine”. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.

For Davison’s last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the show’s dominant—and best—writer throughout the seventies, but had’t worked on the show since ’79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.

The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as “a pathetic little war”, and he’s right—it’s almost perversely small-scale by his standards.

That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on what’s going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. It’s a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor has—just by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.

What’s really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end he’s only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.

It's also remarkably better than everything around it—not just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. It’s better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.

It’s not flawless—the show’s reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, there’s a “computer tablet” that’s blatantly a TV remote, and there’s a “magma beast” that’s anything but. But that’s all true for everything the show was doing in the 80s—but for once, it’s trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.

My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it back—it’s ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show won’t do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.

It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.

As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the show—it was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, I’m not inclined to argue.

Gabriel L. Helman 3/15/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/15/24

Nausicaä at 40

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!

Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. It’s a corpus of work where “best” is meaningless, but “favorite” can sometimes be revealing. My kid’s favorite is Ponyo, so that’s the one I’ve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted I’ve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.

Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki film—a strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that aren’t really villains, good-looking food—but it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.

I can’t now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the book—as much of it as existed—around the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great “I’m an adult now, and I can just go buy things” moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an “adaptation” than a “companion piece.” It’s the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.

So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but that’s a borderline tautology. If I’m honest, it’s a tick more “action-adventure” that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, it’s action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)

I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you can’t tell if it was built or grown. I love the way it’s a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, “Toxic Jungle”,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why it’s there.

Bluntly, I love the way the movie isn’t as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that it’s an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isn’t willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.

Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to “why do you love that so much?” is “because there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didn’t know was there until this clicked into place.”

Gabriel L. Helman 3/5/24 Gabriel L. Helman 3/5/24

March Fifth. Fifth March.

Today is Tuesday, March 1465th, 2020, COVID Standard Time.

Three more weeks to flatten the curve!

What else even is there to say at this point? Covid is real. Long Covid is real. You don’t want either of them. Masks work. Vaccines work.

It didn’t have to be like this.

Every day, I mourn the futures we lost because our civilization wasn’t willing to put in the effort to try to protect everyone. And we might have even pulled it off, if the people who already had too much had been willing to make a little less money for a while. But instead, we're walking into year five of this thing.

Gabriel L. Helman 1/31/24 Gabriel L. Helman 1/31/24

40 years of…

Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computer—a home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fiction—but more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. It’s not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.

That’s not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer I’m writing this on now.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in ’84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. It’s hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in ’84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.

What was this Tandy you speak of, then?

Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest “bet it all on the big win” moves I can think of, the small chain was bought by—of all people—the Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.

I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.

It’s hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.

When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making “big iron”, could they also make “little iron”?

For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoft—maybe you’ve heard of them—with terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was “IBM Compatible”—again, maybe you’ve heard of this—buy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.

One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of “compatible” to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isn’t a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)

As much as the original IBM PC was a “home computer”, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.

Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a “better PCjr” to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.

Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. “Tandy Graphics” was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the “Tandy Sound” could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.

So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do “business software”, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.

The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first King’s Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.

But of course, even the Tandy couldn’t match “arcade games”, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a “PC game” was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words “operating” and “system” in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if you’re trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the “home console” market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, “PC games” had already developed their own identity vs “console games”.

Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hiker’s Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.

A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?

I’m cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didn’t release until November, and we didn’t get ours until early ’85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the “computer guy” at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that he’d get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.

Like I said at the top, it was magic. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.

One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. I’d played arcade games—I’d probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunter—but this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those “the universe was never the same again” moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldn’t type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.

And I wasn’t the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parent’s played that obsessively.

It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, we’re still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because we’re slow.)

Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 that’s their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. I’ve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadn’t brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.

Time marched on.

Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.

Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel “IBM Compatible” platform with the release of Windows 95.

Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friend’s Dad.

Over the years, I’d look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was “a computer person” in the 90s ended up “bilingual”, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.

I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the “pixar lamp” design.

But the thing is, they didn’t do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.

If ’84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?

Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:

Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
People who look at the computer market and thought, “I bet I make a lot of money off of this”.
People who had something else to do, and thought, “I wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?”

As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.

As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.

(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between “Apple people” and “Linux people”. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they don’t have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who aren’t actually serious.)

As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, that’s a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other “computer guys” I was hanging out with; I didn’t want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, that’s just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.

As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?

The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I can’t remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my “game playing” time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was… trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how “the Mac” worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. There’s a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasn’t life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.

So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Here’s to the next forty.

But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.

Gabriel L. Helman 12/17/23 Gabriel L. Helman 12/17/23

Sunday Linkblog, Nightmare before Christmas edition

Noted science fiction author and unrepentant Burrito Criminal John Scalzi has spent every day of December reviewing various “Comfort Watches”, movies you can, as he says, enjoy every time and watch with your brain turned off.

So far, every movie on this list has caused me to ho “heck yes! Love that movie!” when the title pops up in me feed reader. I’ve been meaning to link to this series for a while, so let me gesture towards two fo them for you.

Today’s was The December Comfort Watches, Day Seventeen: The Nightmare Before Christmas. I fully endorse everything he has to say about it, but especially that Danny Elfman’s work was and continues to be the main attraction.

He’s about a decade older than I am so I didn’t come on board with Oingo Boingo like he did; my entry point was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which was just about the greatest movie my then 7-year old mind could imagine. (Well, greatest movie with Luke Skywalker in it, obviously.). Even then, the music was incredible. I spent hours designing breakfast-making Rube Goldberg machines on paper, and that wasn’t just because Abe Lincoln’s expression was funny.

I can’t now recall when I saw Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice, so instead flash forward with me to Batman ’89. Recall how the movie opens: the camera is moving though some kind of strange.. Tunnels? Canyons? It’s not clear. Meanwhile, what’s immediately one of the greatest movie themes of all time is playing over the credits. It’s perfect music for Batman, a little spooky, a little exciting, has a kind of haunted church organ thing happening. The music kicks up a gear, and the camera pulls out of the whatever-the-ares, and it turns out we’ve been flying along inside the Batman logo; and as the logo fills the frame and the music starts going “BUM BUM BUM BUM BUMMM”, 11-year old me thought that was the single coolest thing he had ever seen. Even today, when I occasionally rewatch the movie, that shot sends me right back to being 11 and thinking “holy smokes, they really made a Batman movie!”

Anyway, after that, I was on-board for whatever those guys did.

When Nightmare came out— checks notes huh, also thirty years ago, would you look at that, what the heck was in the water in ’93—I was pumped for it.

It did not disappoint. All three of the major creatives—Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman—have done great work since, but nothing better than this. The absolute peak for everyone involved, and considering their other work, that’s saying something.

However! As long as I have you here, I wish to also call your attention to the Special Edition re-release of the soundtrack from some years ago. This had Patrick Stewart re-record the opening narration, which is as you would expect excellent, but also record the original unused closing narration.

Reader, Nightmare is an almost perfect movie, but I think that ending would have been even better.

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As an addendum, let me also direct you to: The December Comfort Watches, Day Six: Down With Love. Down With Love isn’t so much under-rated as under-acknowledged, there are days I think maybe I dreamed it since no one else ever seems to remember this movie exists. It’s phenomenally good, a movie where absolutely everyone is doing career-best work and knows exactly what the job is. Other than general relief that someone else has seen it, I also mention this because my kids are both at an arts-heavy school, and they’re talking about what pieces from movies they could use as an audition piece. And there a… thing? Towards the end of the movie? Which even obliquely mentioning is too much of a spoiler, but 1) after they shot that they should have directly handed Rene Zellweger the Oscar for that year, and 2) would be an incredible audition monologue. So I’m trying to figure out how to trick my teenagers into watching a 20-year old spoof of a 50-year old movie series.

Gabriel L. Helman 12/16/23 Gabriel L. Helman 12/16/23

Doom @ 30

I feel like there have been a surprising number of “30th anniversaries” this year, I hadn’t realized what a nerd-culture nexus 1993 was!

⁂

So, Doom! Rather than belabor points covered better elsewhere, I’ll direct your attention to Rock Paper Shotgun’s excellent series on Doom At 30.

I had a little trouble with experienced journalists talking about Doom as a game that came out before they were born, I’m not going to lie. A very “roll me back into my mummy case” moment.

⁂

Doom came out halfway though my second year of high school, if I’m doing my math right. My friends and I had all played Wolfenstein, had been reading about it in PC Gamer, we knew it was coming, we were looking forward to it.

At the time, every nerd group had “the guy that could get stuff.” Which usually meant the one with well-off lax parents. Maybe going through a divorce? This was the early 90s, so we were a little past the “do you know where your kids are” era, but by today’s standards we were still pretty… under-supervised. Our guy showed up at school with a stack of 3.5-inch floppies one day. He’d got the shareware version of Doom from somewhere.

I can’t now remember if we fired it up at the school or if we took it to somebody’s house; but I _do_ remember that this was one of maybe three or four times where I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was seeing.¹

Our 386 PC couldn’t really handle it, but Doom had a mode where you could shrink the window down in the center of the monitor, so the computer had fewer pixels to worry about. I played Doom shrunk down nearly all the way, with as much border as image, crouched next to the monitor like I was staring into a porthole to another world.

I think it holds up surprisingly well. The stripped-down, high-speed, arcade-like mechanics, the level design that perfectly matches what the engine can and can’t do, the music, the just whole vibe of the thing. Are later games more sophisticated? Sure, no question. Are they better? Well… Not at shooting demons on a Mars base while early 90s synth-rock plays, no.

⁂

Reading about Doom’s anniversary this last week, I discovered that the current term of art for newly made Doom-like retro-style shooters is “Boomer Shooter.” I know everyone forgets Gen-X exists, that’s part of our thing, but this will not stand. The Boomers can’t have this one—there is no more quintessentially, universal “Gen-X” experience than playing Doom.

Other than everyone forgetting we exist and giving the Boomers credit, that is.

The others, off the top of my head, were probably the original Kings Quest, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto III, and Breath of the Wild.

Gabriel L. Helman 11/23/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/23/23

Doctor Who @ 60

And, squeaking in just before midnight, the best show of all time turned 60 years old today.

There’s a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming up, very much looking forward to seeing what this next iteration of the show is going to be like. There’s probably going to be a real spike of Doctor Who related content around these parts over the next few weeks?

(And, Beep the Meep is in the “Coming Soon” section of Disney+. What a time to be alive.)

Gabriel L. Helman 11/18/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/18/23

Apparently the Last Veridian Note was fifteen years ago?

Wow! Turns out today is the 15th anniversary of the Last Viridian Note. The Viridian Design Movement was one of those fun early web things where Bruce Sterling & company dressed up climate change activism as a design movement. It was a very late-90s “ha ha only serious” thing. It all seems a little bit precious now, in retrospect, but mostly that’s because it was a movement populated entirely by people who hadn’t lived through the first decades of the 21st century yet.

But also this was 6 years before the phrase “grim meathook future” emerged; everyone could sense that the future was coming in fast and would be very different that anyone could predict¹. The veridians, at least, saw it coming and tried to redirect some of the energy in a positive direction, rather than lie back and accept it, or figure out how to use it to get rich. The positive side to all that stuff I was griping about WIRED yesterday².

Anyway, I was super into it. It was always out on the fringe of the fringe, and so after Sterling wrapped up the party in ’08 it seems to have vanished from the discussion. I myself never would have remembered if it hadn’t been referenced in the “this day in history” section of today’s pluralistic.

The Last Note was really Sterling wrapping up everything he’s learned about how to live in current era. While the rest of the “Viridian thing” has floated back into the mists of the “Old Internet”, this essay is something I find myself coming back to every few years.

You should go read the whole thing! But a few pull quotes;

This tends to be the bit people quote if they do:

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

Beautiful things.

Emotionally important things.

Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.

Everything else.

“Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

But my favorite bit is this, which I quoted almost word-for-word when I handed my teenager her first Swiss Army Knife at her birthday:

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

And that’s really the whole thing wrapped up: be someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.

As a total aside, I first saw the phrase in something Warren Ellis wrote, probably whichever of his newsletters was running in ’05. I had forgotten, or just mashed up in my head, that the phrase was coined by Joshua Ellis, no relation. But I digress.
Of course, it was more important to keep an ironic distance than let anything think you were sincere or earnest, so….

Gabriel L. Helman 11/15/23 Gabriel L. Helman 11/15/23

Still out there: The X-Files at 30

The actual anniversary date whipped past me before I noticed, but apparently The X-Files is thirty years old? Let me settle back into my mummy case and enthuse about it.

I’m also late to this party, but it turns out they did a whole remaster/cleanup on the show a few years back, presumably for Blu-Ray, and those copies are whats streaming now. They went back and rescanned the original film and rebuilt the edits from there, and he show looks amazing! Haircuts non-withstanding, it genuinely looks like it could have been filmed this year, unlike a lot of it’s contemporaries. We’ve been watching them on and off, and man, what a fun show that was! There are very, very few shows where you can almost just pick episodes at random and know you’ll enjoy them quite the way you can with The X-Files.

I actually didn’t come in on the show until halfway through the second year; but I was immediately hooked. My initial reaction was that this was as close as we were ever going to get to an “American Doctor Who” (or really any new Who at all there in the wilderness years of early 90s). A pair of FBI agents solving supernatural/monster/alien problems on a weekly basis? And mostly solving those problems by not just, you know, shooting them? Yes Please!

That said, I’m pretty sure I was the one one that saw a Doctor Who connection. While the cited inspiration is always Kolchak, and UFOs and conspiracy theories were hot in the 90s, The X-Files always struck me as a show designed outward from trying to figure out how to make Twin Peaks viable as an ongoing show.

It took the core premise, “Eccentric FBI agents investigate possibly supernatural crimes in small town America” and then made several very savvy changes.

First, everywhere Twin Peaks satirized nighttime soap operas, X-Files swapped that out with the shape of a standard police procedural. Gone was the sprawling ensamble cast, replaced with a core regular pair and a one-off guest cast, in the mold of something like Law & Order. Instead of a single small town, it was a new semi-rural location every week, freeing up the guest cast to meet the needs of the mood of the week instead of servicing their own stories. The relationship between Mulder and Scully was similar to that between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, but both main characters were FBI, freeing the core cast from being stuck in any one location. And as many, many people have observed, making the “believer” character the man and the skeptical scientist the woman went against the grain of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the time, adding a unique flavor to the show almost “for free,” alongside a light dose of Moonlighting-style sparks. (Not to mention The X-Files even stars one of the best guest-stars from Twin Peaks.)

And both the main characters were really fun to spend time with. They were interesting, and complicated, and had a unique relationship, and were both actually really good at their jobs. Personally, I always wanted to be Scully when I grew up (not a gender thing, I just wanted to be really good at my hard job, be well respected by my peers, have cool banter with coworkers, and then once or twice a season haul a pistol out and shoot a monster without missing. Mulder tended to miss a lot for drama reasons, but if Scully pulled her gun out, someone was getting shot.)

But most critically, it learned the most important lesson of Twin Peaks: that Laura Palmer was too central, and revealing her murderer effectively ended the show. The X-Files’ equivalent, Mulder’s sister’s disappearance and the alien conspiracy, would be an ongoing concern, but was never as omnipresent as Laura Palmer, and was never fully explained or revealed. Of course, X-Files ended up overcorrecting too far, and allowed the alien mythology to sprawl out far beyond any reasonable attempt to make sense.

Personally, I always much preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes, and those were still fun long past where the “mythology” imploded into incoherence. And that was the thing: the show was always fun. And we can just ignore those last couple of years where they squandered the built-up goodwill and the alien plot fizzled out.

Thirty years on, though, that’s what fascinates me about The X-Files. There are plenty of examples of shows that were initially very popular that blew the landing. Lost, the”new” Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, even something like Quantum Leap. Mostly, those shows have slipped out of the conversation, and when they do come up, it’s always with a groan about the end first, and usually that’s all. No one talks about BSG’s stupendous first season, they talk about the robot dance party it ended with.

But not with the X-Files! When that comes up, the topic is always the relationship between Multer and Scully, or the best monsters, or the vibe of the thing, and the last years get treated as an afterthought. Most people won’t even remember that it started Terminator Two for a while unless reminded. For a while The X-Files looked like it was going to be the definitive example of how not to do a long-running plot, why you should work things out ahead of time, and for running out clock too long, but no, Lost took that seat.

Why? Why does X-Files get a pass on the ending, which was just as much a fumble as those others?

I think there’s two big reasons.

First, the show’s pleasures extended beyond the “big plot.” Even at its peak, there were plenty of fans who preferred the non-mythology episodes. The big story failing to cohere didn’t intersect with the joy of watching Scully and Mulder deal with monsters, or vampires, or Peter Boyle.

But more importantly, is something a friend of mine said while talking about this: “Everyone quit watching it when it was still good.” And I think that’s it. Those other shows everyone stuck around to the bitter end. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I don’t know anyone other than myself that stuck it out to the last episode of the X-Files. There were plenty of off-ramps: the moves from Friday to Sunday, the movie, Duchovny leaving. It stayed pretty good for a long time past its peak, and most everyone drifted away before it got actually bad.

I mean, Friday Night X-Files was appointment viewing when I was in college, but everyone had something better to do on Sunday nights. (Except that brief window where it was Simpsons-Futurama-X-Files, that was pretty good.)

As such, most people’s last memory of the show is something like Multer being trapped in the past in the bermuda triangle, rather than, say, Bran having the best story, or Sam just not going home, or whatever the hell Lost tried to sell us.

And so I think all that’s the real lesson The X-Files has for us, all these years later. Long-form serialized TV is great, and as a form is here to stay, but if you only have the one big plot, all you actually have is the ending. If your show works week-to-week without that, and it’s full of characters that are fun to spend time with, people are still going to be rewatching it three decades later.

Gabriel L. Helman 10/17/23 Gabriel L. Helman 10/17/23

What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man

Sometimes, the best movies are the ones that you find by accident. Demolition Man was one of those.

I distinctly remember there was a mostly-playful rivalry between Demolition Man and Last Action Hero over the course of ’93. Both were the new “big movies” from Schwarzenegger and Stallone—the two biggest action stars of the time—and both were pivoting into the “action comedy” space of the early 90s. (As opposed to the absurdly straight-faced camp the two had been dealing with throughout the 80s.). This had some additional overtones with Arnold operating at a career peak thanks to T2, whereas it had been “a while” since Stalone had a hit.

Last Action Hero, of course, bombed. (To be clear, it’s a bad movie, but the whole middle third in the movie world is better than most people remember, and the joke with Arnold cleaning himself off after he climbs out of the tar pit with only a single paper towel deserves a better movie around it.)

My memory is that Demolition Man didn’t do that well either. The attitude I recall was “well, better than Last Action Hero, anyway”, but not terribly positive. If there was a winner between the two movies, Demolition Man was it, but more by default than anything? (Skimming old reviews, it clearly got some blowback for being “trying to be funny”, action and comedy still not being a common pairing, which considering how the next 30 years went is hilarious. In that respect, at least, the movie doesn’t feel three decades old.)

I didn’t see it in theatres, but it stuck in the back of my mind as “hey, maybe check that out sometime.”

Months later, it found itself, like so many other middlingly successful movies, on constant rotation on cable. (HBO, presumably, but I refuse to go look it up). For some reason, my sister and I found ourselves at home some evening on our own with nothing better to do, and stumbled across it just as it was starting. Sure, let’s give this a whirl for a bit, see if it’s better than the reviews made it sound.

And, of course, it turned out to be great.

It’s an almost perfect early-90s action movie—violent without being too violent, sweary without being too sweary, big explosions, fun action set pieces, jokes that are funny, and a cast that looks like they’re having a great time.

To briefly recap: Sylvester Stallone plays John Spartan, a police officer in the then-near-future of 1996 nicknamed “the demolition man” for the amount of property damage he causes while fighting crime. Westly Snipes is Simon Pheonix, crime lord of near-future LA. Phoenix frames Spartan for the deaths of a building full of civilians during a raid, and the pair of them are sentenced to CryoPrison, where they’re frozen in giant ice tanks to wait out their sentences. (In one of the movie’s many literary references, the CryoCells are frozen instantly something isn't named but is clearly supposed to be ice-nine from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.)

Thirty six years in the future, Phoenix escapes from a parole hearing, whereupon Spartan is thawed out to earn an early release by catching his old foe.

The future, meanwhile, is not what either expected, as they find themselves in “San Angeles”, a seemingly utopian combined LA, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, where there’s no real cime, the police don’t enforce anything, swearing is a ticket-able offense, the radio only plays vintage commercials, Otho from Beetlejuice is wearing a mumu, and all restaurants are Taco Bell since the end of the Francise Wars. Because, of course, we’re in one of those “friendly on the surface” dystopias of the THX-1138 / Brave New World mold, where everyone is either trapped in the authoritarian regine with a smile, or eking out a living in the sewers. (Actually, the closest other example I can think of is Doctor Who’s anti-Thatcher scream, “The Happiness Patrol.”)

Spartan is partnered up with a pre-Speed Sandra Bullock’s rookie cop Lenina Huxley (speaking of literary references,) and the two of them track down the mystery of how Phoenix was able to escape and who’s really behind it all.

The action is pretty standard early 90s stuff, mostly real guns with with vaguely science-fictional bits glued on the end, that kind of thing. The centerpiece of the movie is watching both Stalone and Snipes react to the future starting with morbid fascination and ending with open horror than anyone would live like this.

Stalone is always better when he gets to be a little funny, and he does some of his best work in years as John Spartan is constantly wrong-footed by the future while just tying to be an action hero. Sandra Bullock nails both “comic sidekick” and “rookie cop” while hitting the very specific tone of the movie’s jokes (“you can take this job and shovel it”). And Westly Snipes turns in one of the definitive comic book villain performances as Simon Phoenix. The rest of the cast seem to be having a great time, even Denis Leary shows up to be extremely early-90s Denis Leary.

The movies milks a lot of mileage out of Stalone as a fish out of water the “evil utopia” future. The “three seashells” in the bathroom has proven to be the joke with the most pop culture staying power, but for my money the better joke are the ticket printers constantly clattering in the background whenever someone swears. Which feels like a subtle comment on the style of movies at the time?

It’s one of the few movies to try and do future dialect in a convincing way; “enhance you calm,” “what seems to be your boggle?” and the like all elicit a surprised “what did you just say?” reaction while feeling like something that could evolve in the passive agressive dystopia of San Angeles.

Plus, all restaurants are Taco Bell!

It’s aged better than many of its contemporaries , but it’s hard to imagine a plot more wrapped up in the illusory anxieties of the early 90s than the twin pillars of “Gang violence has turned LA into a literal war zone,” and “the worst possible future is if the Politically Correct crowd oppresses the poor libertarians.”

Daniel Waters, who wrote the final script, claims he didn’t have a political angle, but considering we’re talking about the guy who wrote Heathers, you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical that all that stuff ended up in there by accident.

But, while it still has Dennis Leary show up and deliver the Big Speech About Freedom, it’s a movie with a far more nuanced and ambiguous take on the subject than, say, John Carpenter’s Libertarian Manifesto disguised as Escape from LA. (Although even that movie gets way more interesting when you remember to pair it with They Live, the definitive anti-Reagan movie; but I digress.)

Westly Snipes’ Simon Pheonix has the future’s architect figured out when he calls him an “evil Mister Rogers”; this is a movie that knows that there are worse things out there than wearing mumus and having too many rules. The future’s villains are displaced with comical ease by Phoenix and his gang, and even more critically, the future libertarian resistance proves utterly useless against a real threat. Even the 90s machismo is quietly undercut by Stalone’s knitting.

Instead, the movie ends on a final note of “you dorks all need to relax,” which is probably a moral we could use more of.

But! That all value add; the joy of this movie is in its impish sense of humor as it works through the various action standards.

A favorite example: Towards the end of the movie, Stalone is standing with the now allied rebels and police, all on their way to stop Snipes from waking up the denizens of the CryoPrison.

“Loan me a gun,” he says to Denis Leary’s character, who immediately slaps a revolver in his hand faster than he expects. Without missing a beat, Stalone immediately follows up with “Loan me two guns.”

It didn’t do terribly well in the fall of ’93, but it seems to have been one of those movies that got a real second life on home video. Many, many people seemed to have the same experience I did—stumbling across it, going in with low expectations, and then being delighted to discover something brilliant.

I’m not sure where it lies in the greater Action Movie Canon these days, but I note that everyone I’ve ever talked to about it have fallen cleanly into two camps—folks who don’t remember it at all, and people who love it, a movie that quietly found its people over the years.

It’s a good one.

(And my sister and I still say “Illuminate” whenever we turn on the lights to a room.)

Gabriel L. Helman 6/25/23 Gabriel L. Helman 6/25/23

Thirty Years of Tentacles

How can Day of the Tentacle possibly be thirty years old?

A stone cold classic, and still one of the best adventure games ever made.

I have an incredibly clear memory of standing in the games section of CompUSA as a teenager, watching the opening of DOTT loop on one of the demo machines there, and literally laughing out loud in the middle of the store. I couldn’t believe a game could actually look like that. It was actually funny! And well animated! One of those times where the future has arrived and you can’t quite believe your eyes. I wish it had been more of trendsetter in that regard, and that more games had chased “Chuck Jones Looney Tunes” as a model, instead of “photo-real direct-to-video action movie.”

As another sign of the changing times, as if CompUSA wasn’t enough early 90s nostalgia, I never would have remembered that DOTT came out in June. I got it for christmas that year, and it’s hard to believe we waited for six months. And I remember agonizing about getting the floppy disk or CD-ROM version, since we were worried the CD versions “full voice” might be “too distracting.” Too distracting! Phew, maybe it has been 30 years.

Gabriel L. Helman 3/22/23 Gabriel L. Helman 3/22/23

Wild Things at 25

Wild Things turns 25 this week! Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.

My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things. “It’s our generation’s Fatal Attraction!” she said. I did not want to go see this movie. Everything about it looked mediocre.

From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie you’d rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.

There was also kind of a mid 90s “we just found about about Carl Hiassen” bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida. (See also: Striptease.)

And, who was in it? Matt Dillon, who was mostly “no, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders. No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,” four months out from Something About Mary. Neve Campbell, who was still mostly “the girl from Party of Five.” Denise Richards, who was still mostly “the girl from Starship Troopers.” Kevin Bacon? Not a great 90s track record, but sure. Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the “funny cameo in Ed Wood” phase.

A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie. Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between “real” projects. Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida. Sure! No judgement! Everyone has bills to pay.

I made this argument. We went to go see the movie opening weekend.

[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]

And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect. Two high school girls, one “rich/hot”, one “poor/goth”. Dorky guidance counselor. Maybe something happens? Maybe consensual, maybe not? Rape accusation. The movie is running the standard playbook. You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.

Except.

The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be. The camera work is intertesting. The music by George Clinton is way better than you’d expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe. Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why he’s months out from a whole second act of his career. All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be. The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldn’t have.

And then it turns into a totally different movie.

With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that it’s seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.

I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasn’t what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.

This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers what’s still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light. It’s phenomenal.

Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations. So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.

It doesn’t seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory. An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s. Happy Birthday!