By Roy Mathur, on 2024-12-16, at 00:06:47 to 00:40:57 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Saturday's short walk with Mum past Bradwell Abbey pilgrim's chapel and yesterday's brief trip Tesco's have left me exhausted. My arm is also getting better, but tires easily. What I'm saying is that I'm not quite ready with the shiny new content you might have been expecting. Instead, regard this as an intermission while I recover, to say hello, and to tie up loose ends from the last couple of pods.
In 557, I forgot to mention that I revisited The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), also set on Telos, back in 2015 in pod 90. I should have blended what I thought back then with what I thought now and it would have made a much more interesting chat. Let's rectify this gross injustice!
The plot was substantially different between the two. Previously on Telos, Jamie, the Doctor, and Victoria met an expedition to the tomb of the Cybermen, where they encountered a trap to attract the most logical minds for cyber-conversion. Whereas the second was a depressing journey that ended in mass death. I enjoyed the adventurous older story much more than the nihilistic newer one. In both, however, the Cybermen were less sinister in appearance than their cloth-faced brethren. The first was more impressive, with Aztec-like monumental architecture and fantastic incidental music. The first was also hard science fiction, with gates, Whitehead logic, power series, integration, binary, symbolic logic, functions, Boolean logic, etc. In summary, Tomb was better than Attack.
Robot! Post-Butlerian Jihad, robots are still apparently a problem, so I still maintain that the creepy soldier is of robot-kind. I haven't read Brian and Kevin's continuation novels, so if I'm wrong, so be it. In any case, I suspect this is old news by now because I have only reached episode three.
Aside: I said on numerous occasions that the 2000 miniseries, Frank Herbert's Dune, was made by Hallmark. It wasn't, it was made by a group of obscure international companies and released on SyFy. Sorry about that, it's just someone mistakenly told me that in the early 2000s and it memed it's way into my head.
In 559, I left out details of the 1977 short horror, that would have cast it in a better light than my dismissive: "muddled" with an unearned "shock ending".
There is an explanation for the stigmata, in that a stabbed corpse is found buried under the mystic stone in the garden.
I said in 559 that I enjoyed the "spooky countryside". Regarding that point, there is a scene in which Mrs Delagado hears mischievous tinkling laughter and food rummaged through and left partly eaten in the kitchen. Was that supposed to be the work of little people, a myth originating from grave goods left in in ancient barrow mounds?
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024) is the latest Disney+ Star Wars series. The showrunners and writers are Jon Watts and Christopher Fordabout. Directing and producing credits include the incredibly high-powered Bryce Dallas Howard, Favreau, Filoni, Kennedy, etc. Set during The Mandalorian, it stars Jude Law, Nick Frost, and a troupe of absurdly young actors. Mick Giacchino provides the music, that's music had me earworming for months. Thomas Bacon of Screen Rant said it's Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home) from 1983, a sequel of Bowie's Major Tom.
The first two episodes are about a bunch of kids from what looks like the Star Wars version of idyllic 80s Spielbergian suburbia Americana; nice lawns, sun, and kids on speeder bikes instead of BMXs. They stumble upon an ancient spaceship and inadvertently launch themselves from their sheltered, hidden, and apparently legendary paradise home world, into the hazardous greater Star Wars galaxy. Shades on Life, the Universe, and Everything, anyone?
It's E.T., The Goonies, and Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride in space, that also cannibalises it's own legacy with scenes and characters ripped from Star Wars (1977). Look, it's not bad, it's likeable, kid-friendly Saturday morning mush, but it has nowhere near the gravitas of The Acolyte. Oh, wait...
This is a 1984 BBC fantasy series based on John Masefield's 1935 novel. It started promisingly enough, with a boy making friends with a mysterious old Punch and Judy professor (Patrick Troughton) at a train station. He later gives the boy a magical box and asks him to guard it from his sinister shape-changing enemies.
Kay, the boy, is a rich little Fauntleroy, his school hat reminded my of my own, which set my teeth on edge, but his kindness won me through. Mostly. The scene where he delights in stabbing a wolf threw me off. Robert Stephens and James Grout played very similar characters to the ones they would later play in Inspector Morse; a well-spoken creep and a ever-so-slightly bumbling copper respectively. I didn't envy the children being filmed in the snow. They look cold and uncomfortable. Kay clearly had a previous relationship with mouse when he shrinks, which I didn't understand, until I remember reading that the book is the second in a series that began with The Midnight Folk.
It's something I may finish, but during the scene in the Drop of Dew pub, the professor produces a phoenix in the hearth from an image in Kay's mind. I remembered my reaction to this scene back in 1984 and why I have never continued the series beyond this point in the past. You see, one of my favourite series from childhood was BBC's The Phoenix and the Carpet from 1976. When I first saw the Kay's phoenix in 1984, I was delighted in thinking I was watching a repeat of the adaptation of E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet from 1904, then I was disappointed when I realised it was something else. That disappointment, combined with Kay's blood-thirsty glee at hacking at the wolves are the only negatives in this mythic, fantastical adventure. Don't take my word for it because I played it on BBC iPlayer for Mum on her birthday and she thoroughly enjoyed it.
Tinging theme tune too.
Is it enough to say a Whovian is someone who who watches Doctor Who even if they don't need to? Though my TV consumption is down, that's what I've been doing. I've rewatched the Tennant and Tate 14th Doctor specials and found them to be better than I originally thought. I've watched Whittaker's 13th in Resolution and some of Spyfall, again finding it better on rewatch.
As you can see from the numerous gaffs I've addressed tonight, I'm not near one hundred percent myself yet, not on form, a tad down in the mouth and brain-fogged, but I shall return.