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From Raquel with Love (1980)
A Product of Its Time/A Heroine's Journey?
I guess you could consider this a fusion of multiple genres at once. It's a revue. It's a songspiel. It's a postcard of New York City as it was at the end of the Seventies. And in some manners it seems like a parody of what it's trying to accomplish--maybe because it's such a love letter to what has come before.
The plot, such as it is, has a actress arrive in the City and she meets a cabbie who takes her all over town, and there are various song and dance numbers at every turn. The cabbie informs her that to succeed in New York she need three things: Money, Muscle and Magic. "Is there a WRONG kind of money?" is one of the first questions she asks back. And she has a great many other questions that get asked and answered.
I'm not going to spoil what happens. She gets lost, found, caught, escaped, rescues, and eventually finds an unexpected answer to her dream of a home.
The Wild Racers (1968)
Comfortable And Pretty, But Unengaging
I first saw this movie when I was eleven years old. I was watching TV hoping to find some escape from the grief of losing a relative, and on that level it delivered adequately. But beyond that it meant nothing, because ultimately it's not about anything.
There are two characters in this movie: Fabian's JoeJoe and the scenery of Western Europe. Yes, there are more cast members but they are only scenery to JoeJoe. Dancers to dance with, women to bed with, other drivers to run against, team coaches to argue with and so on...but none of these are really characters anywhere near JoeJoe's level. Still, he's pretty shallow and superficial, and he even admits it. In the Madrid Bullfight arena/Jarama racetrack sequence, he calls the bull "dumb" but ultimately invites the audience to compare JoeJoe's pursuit of the Checkered Flag to the bull's pursuit of the Matador's cape. Is JoeJoe's girlfriend dumb for not making the comparison herself, or wise for making the comparison internally but not telling JoeJoe what she thinks?
I wonder if Robert Redford drew from this or likable movies when he made DOWNHILL RACER years later.
Visually, this is fabulous stuff. The race scenes are genuinely well cut and the travelogue scenes of European cities and landscapes are well worth the effort. But unlike Steve McQueen's LE MANS four years later, or Paul Newman's WINNING two years after this movie, none of this visual art is thrown in service of a plot line. This movie is a traffic circle; it ends how it begins. Neither JoeJoe nor anything else really changes that we don't expect.
The music is interesting stuff, a mix of California surf rock and Continental go-go pop for the incidentals, with some French-language pop love songs thrown in for make-out ambiance. Modern audiences would probably find the latter stuff tiresome, but don't worry about it; the two paradigms shift snappily from one to the other and back.
It's not said which racing circuit the filmmakers used for this feature, but a little research let me determine that this was Formula 2, which later became Formula 3000 and is to F1 what IndyLights is to IRL and the Nationwide Grand Nationals is to NASCAR. It looks like Fabian did his own driving in some of the scenes and I didn't notice any process shots like were common at that time. The car he has on the track is a Brabham with a Cosworth engine; it belonged to a real F2 team that won five Championship season races that year.
The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
How I See The Story
In this movie, Paris is basically a typical Third World nation in microcosm: You have a charismatic dictator (the Mayor) surrounded by yes-men and flunkies, an economy that has no real industry as such and forced to take "foreign aid" any way it can, a populace who is so dependent on the dictator's policies that it will support them whatever the moral cost--and not challenge him when times go bad, and the army (the kids with the hot rod cars) who do the dirty work but don't share the benefits and have no future. There is a perversion of civil society, law and order, and moral justice that is acceptable to the "Parisians" but wouldn't be acceptable in a "free" society.
The protagonist comes to Paris as a refugee, accepts the situation, and witnesses the chaos when the moral cost of the Mayor's racket hits a tipping point and people start voting with their gas pedals. The monsters in this movie are the ones we breed in our own societies when those in power do what they want (even if they believe it is for the greater good) and enact unethical policies.
Kraft Suspense Theatre: Streetcar, Do You Read Me? (1965)
A Quick Learning Experience--For Both The Characters And The Viewer!
Caught the second half or so of this episode on RTV tonight. Hadn't seen the series at all before so I looked it up on RTV's website first, and then Wikipedia before coming here.
"Streetcar" is a U.S. Air Force bomber jet on patrol over the ocean when the situation goes haywire. The pilot is incapacitated; the navigator has gotten off course, and it's up to a young and insecure co-pilot to save the day. Can he re-establish contact with home base, find the tanker plane sent in search for him, and get the plane refueled before it falls into the sea and is lost for good? This is a typical presentation of the times when the Pentagon was eager to show off the Air Force's multi-million-dollar hardware and so we have plentiful color footage of the B-47 bomber and KC-135 tanker jets. The casting is good and the production values are close to feature-film quality (which is better than normal for the era). The writing, however, is fairly standard for the times. I call it "military procedural" (as opposed to "police procedural") in which the armed services are presented in the kinds of crises that "happen once in a while, but we have the means to handle them because of the capable people we recruit". I've seen this repeated a dozen different places, some better and some worse than shown here.
The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979)
It's Back...Kinda
Hey.
RTN is showing this series (perhaps along with B.J. & The Bear?) on Sunday afternoons/evenings.
When it was running the first time, the NBC affiliate for Tampa Bay refused to air it in its network-mandated time slot for something else (I forget just what) and put it on some horrible late-night slot on Sunday night/Monday morning. So I saw the tail end of an episode for the very first time yesterday.
I don't know if I would have liked it back in '79~'80 when I was turning teenager and was beginning to get overloaded on car chase genre action shows. This show is just so TYPICAL. You have the old man Sheriff, the goof-ball deputy, the pretty-boy deputy, and then the usual Central Casting darlings you see in all these shows. The writing and production values are standard-level, neither all that great or all that awful. No wonder it never clicked like some of the others had at that time.
Okay...I'll say one thing in defense of this series--it was better than "Border Pals."
Heavy Gear: The Animated Series (2001)
Just started watching on DVD
I found the first DVD of the series in a discount store's bargain bin. I've been watching it with the commentary track on so as to pay more attention to the behind-the-scenes story and the actual artwork.
The producers said that the impetus for changing the focus of HG:TAS came from Bandai, who planned to market a series of action figures and toys based on the show. Bandai had previously made (via their animation arm Sunrise) Armored Trooper VOTOMS, which was one of the primary inspirations for the Heavy Gear pen-&-paper game. But Bandai didn't have the merchandising rights to VOTOMS; that belonged to Bandai's rival Takara (now Tomy). So the last thing Bandai wanted to see from Sony was a remake (or a perceived remake!) of VOTOMS, especially as Bandai was also keen about the possibility of releasing a version of HG:TAS in Japan. That would have opened Bandai up for a lawsuit like the kind that flared between Playmates and Tyco over the Exo-Squad/Robotech and Battletech toy product lines.
One excuse that was offered about HG:TAS in the past was that the show isn't ABOUT Terranova (the setting of Heavy Gear the games)--it's a show FROM Terranova. I'll have to see more of it to decide how well that argument works.
The producers have also said that they had high hopes for the show...adding more duelist teams, having different adventures, adding new Gear robot designs and so on.
Mad Max (1979)
Finally Got the DVD
Hey.
Got the DVD and got around to seeing it overnight. I'll probably see it again sometime very soon too. But I have to say this first: The audio track is really messed up. The dialog is recorded too soft and the sound effects and music are too loud. This frustrated my father with him perpetually resetting the volume on our TV set while trying to follow the speeches. The sound probably worked better in theaters, but for a home system it doesn't work well at all. I know the filmmakers probably didn't have a choice. I guess when I watch it again, I'll put the closed captioning on.
So as not to repeat (or dispute) anything said by others up to now, a few thoughts of my own: I saw "The Cars That Ate Paris" last year on cable, and I'm thinking of it now as a kind of prelude to "Mad Max", if not an actual prequel. You see, in "Cars" you have a societal breakdown of the kind that could produce a world like "Mad Max"'s. The same goes for Roger Corman's dark comedy "Gas-s-s-s"...but "Cars That Ate Paris" is a better match. Heck, in "Cars" you even have a similar story about a man wrestling with issues of conscience and madness in the face of psychological trauma, in addition to the vehicular violence.
Perspective for the times...going into the end of the Seventies, you had Hal Needham's stunt spectacle movies like "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Hooper" in theaters...and I bet George Miller saw them and got ideas from them in making "Mad Max". And then there was Corman and his multitude of biker gang movies and "Death Race 2000".
I'm not saying Miller wasn't an innovator...he certainly was. His use of camera angles in "Mad Max" is particularly striking. "Mad Max" didn't start a trend so much as it took existing trends, merged them, and threw them into a new direction that is still influential some 25 years later.
One of the posters included in the DVD gallery called "Mad Max" "The 'Easy Rider' of the Eighties"...and that was a good description of its stature, at least. In my video collection, I have at least three "Mad Max"/"Road Warrior" imitators that I can think of. I suppose the thinking of the age was if George Miller could do what he did with such a small budget, why not somebody else? And of course, they all failed...because they matched the style but not the substance.
Somebody at my alma mater High School had a souped-up black Mustang fastback with the slogan "Mad Max" on the windshield.
The Great Skycopter Rescue (1980)
I Thought This Was a Bad Drug Trip--and I Never Took Drugs
I saw this once on a very late Late Show when I was a teenager, and it was already culturally passé then. It reeked of the same vibe that gave us "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Smokey and the Bandit" and all those other car chase shows. It used the music that we now know as the theme for Monday Night Football on its soundtrack too.
At that time in our History, we were in this weird state of frustration as a nation. Our leaders were either aloof or outright corrupt. Our economy was a shambles. We hated ourselves just as we were "supposed" to be loving ourselves, it being the Bicentennial. We were into cathartic nihilism. Which is what this movie attempted to deliver.
Anyway, this movie was predictable when it tried to be original, hokey when it tried to be cool, dull when it tried to be exciting, and showed every penny of its budget, which wasn't much.
Who needs to see falling bowling-pin bombs in slow motion, anyway?
Uchû kaizoku kyaputen Hârokku (1978)
As a Matter of Fact, I DO Want to Be a Harlock!
I was first attracted to Space Pirate Captain Harlock from an illustration of him included in Robotech Art 1, the program guidebook/album of the Robotech TV series. And so when the times came, I bought two of the dubbed Harlock videos from the TV series and the dubbed versions of Arcadia of My Youth (the unfortunately cut-down version from Celebrity Home Video) and the two Galaxy Express 999 movies. I'll limit my comments to the TV series tapes in this statement.
As the story begins, Earth is in a period of economic prosperity and lax morality, somewhat akin to the Roaring '20s in America. The people have become apathetic about themselves and each other--even the planet's President would rather watch the racehorses on TV than do his job.
Rebelling against this madness is Harlock, captain of the rogue battleship Arcadia, who raids the ships carrying luxury items to Earth not out of greed but as a political statement. His Jolly Roger is not a symbol of terror but of personal liberty and morals.
When the threat of extraterrestrial invasion looms, only Harlock and his 40 thieves are ready to face it--while the Earth government can only panic and blame their only savior out of their stupidity.
The animation for the show is typical for 1970s material. Some of the special effects--like the collision between two planets later on--hold up well by modern standards. But bear in mind that this series was made long before computers became a tool in the art of animation.
The dubbing job added narration that was needless (and in some cases, totally WRONG storywise), and humorous lines for comic relief that were also needless. But the flavor of the show is mostly intact, something to be grateful for.
The series spawned a feature film version, not at all related to Arcadia of My Youth. I haven't seen it, but I expect it to be the highlights of the series, the same as the initial Space Cruiser Yamato movie and the Danguard Ace movie.
Ring Raiders (1989)
A Typical Concept With Typical Execution
"Ring Raiders" is very much like other toy-license-based cartoons of its time (the late 1980s). It shares the same production staff of "COPS"/"CyberCOPS" and "Phantom:2040" and doesn't fall too far conceptwise from the premises of "COPS", "G. I. Joe", and the like.
The plotline is also very standard: a band of airborne pirates have discovered time travel and are using this knowledge to cause havoc in both the past and the future. The governments of the future react by recruiting the best fighter pilots in history to hunt down the pirates. The pirates are known as the Skull Squadron (fans of "Robotech" know where this came from, of course) and the government's team is the Ring Raiders--called this for the cybernetic rings they wear.
Cub Jones, a novice American Navy pilot from World War Two, is recruited by the Ring Raiders when the Skull Squadron emerges in his era. The plot of the first episode is Cub's rescue from peril at the hands of the Skulls and initiation into the Raiders--and the subsequent mission as the Skulls' delayed-reaction weapon sets off volcanoes all around the world.
Good and evil are sharply defined by Peter Chung's character designs. There is no doubt that Wraither, Hubbub, Mako, Syren and Chiller are through and through villainy, willing to accomplish Scorch's nasty plans with the utmost ruthlessness. As well, Vector, Yakamura, Miles, Jenny Gale, Kirkov, Thundercloud, Cub and Von Klaudeitz would not look out of place among the heroic G. I. Joe team characters. I'm sure if the show had been more successful in getting syndication, we would have seen these characters in action-figure form.
I once showed the "Ring of Fire" tape to some friends and we came to the agreement that it substantially showed much that was wrong with American-concept cartoons...in particular the commercialism and black-and-white moralizing. It didn't help that the tape included adverts for the myriad merchandise related to the show--from lunchboxes to bed linen.
But never before and never again in American cartoons was the theme of aviation covered in so much visual detail. The planes, which in many other cartoons would just be rendered in generic designs, would be easily recognizable to airplane fans: the Grumman Wildcat, Mikoyan Foxbat, SAAB Viggen, Northrop Tiger II, and Fokker Triplane are among the featured machines. The Japanese cartoon "Area 88" appeared at about the same time and shares the same subject matter...it would make a good counterpoint to "Ring Raiders".
There were less than 10 episodes of the show made, judging from material I found in books and on-line. Only the first one saw any public release that I know of. I'm looking for the rest myself. Even though "Ring Raiders" wasn't a great show, it was a satisfactory one for me.
Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad (1994)
A Guilty Pleasure--But Probably Just For Me
I was a fan of the original Ultraman TV series, watching old reruns when I was a child. When Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad came along (first as a toy line), I was immediately attracted to it. Tsuburaya Productions, who made Ultraman, also made the source for Syber-Squad ("Gridman"). I'll probably seek out that as well. What I like most about Syber-Squad, apart from the spectacular special effects brought from the Japanese original, is the incidental music score and the enthusiasm of the new cast, who more than make up for the corny puns and minimalist production values. I own the third tape of the series, "The Glitch That Stole Christmas", which I consider the best of them.