Fiction Hack Posts

So who is Doctor Who, anyway? It’s a fair question, and one that we have to travel 50 years into the past in order to answer fully. This week we pick up with the very first Doctor, mention very briefly “Dr. Who”, and blow through the Second Doctor–essentially all the black and white (and missing)episodes. Join us on a journey through space and time as we ask… who is Doctor Who?

Ross’ Notes

• First up, this episode is in NO WAY meant to be a comprehensive guide, only an introduction. That said, I’m fairly well-versed in Doctor Who lore, so I challenge anyone to find ANY MISTAKES AT ALL with anything that I’ve said.
• FIRST MISTAKE: Doctor Who first aired on 23 November 1963, not 1965.
• Authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died on the same day as John F. Kennedy. In 1963. Not 1965.
• Check out some bio info for Verity Lambert. She’s quite an inspiring person.
• The biopic starring David Bradley that we’re talking about is called An Adventure in Space and Time, and was aired in 2013. You can buy it here:

• Best episodes to hit for the First Doctor (links to the BBC website in a separate window):
  • An Unearthly Child
  • The Daleks
  • The Edge of Destruction
  • The Keys of Marinus
  • The Dalek Invasion of Earth
  • The Time Meddler
  • The Tenth Planet
• Best episodes to hit for the Second Doctor:
  • The Tomb of the Cybermen
  • The Enemy of the World Recently rediscovered!
  • The Invasion
  • The Seeds of Death
  • The War Games

• Find out more about the Peter Cushing Dr Who here. He’s largely been forgotten, which is kind of a shame, but the movies add almost nothing to the mythos of The Doctor, having been made from rewritten episodes and not any better realised the second time around.
• CORRECTION: Did I say that Derrick Sherwin died? He did not! I think I was thinking of the great Berry Letts.
• Graeme Harper is the guy who has directed for both the old Doctor Who series and the new series. His first directed episodes were the Caves of the Adrozani in 1984, which was the last Fifth Doctor story, and he rejoined the family in 2006, during the David Tennant/RTD run.
• I’ll give a shout out to the Tardis Data Core, which is a fan-run wikia, and is the bookmark I always go to first for Doctor Who info.

What is the problem with Die Hard? It’s just a fun movie right? I mean, Bruce Willis is really good in it, Alan Rickman gives a career-making performance, and there are a couple cool explosions. What’s not to like? What’s the problem with Die Hard? Well…

Ross’ Show Notes

• John McTiernan on IMDB.com. For more information about his hard times, check out this article.
• Think about how phenomenal McTiernan’s early career was. Three solid movies that all launched franchises, after a fashion. Die Hard (1988) has had four sequels to date and that isn’t even the front runner. Predator (1987) has had four and is getting a fifth this year, and Hunt For Red October (1990) was the first of the five Jack Ryan movies, a character which also now has its own series on Amazon Prime. The actors that have played Jack Ryan are Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford (twice), Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski. 
• The Thai movie staring Tony Jaa that Colin is describing looks to be The Protector (2005).
• Do listen to the Die Hard commentary. Other factual information has been taken from Wikipedia: Die Hard, Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), A Good Day to Die Hard (2013).
• First Blood was released in 1982, and Commando was 1985. Defining a genre is pretty hard to do. But many credit First Blood as the first of the 80s wave of action movies. That same year saw Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in the first “buddy cop movie”, 48 Hrs.
• Other high points of the 80s Action genre are Terminator in 1984 and Lethal Weapon  in 1987.
• The Detective (1968) on IMDB.com.
• Gordon Douglas directed The Detective, and he was quite the workhorse. Starting out as a child (teenage, really) actor in Hal Roach comedies, he went on to direct the horror classic Them! (1954), They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), and a host of Frank Sinatra vehicles, including my favourite: Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964).
• The Martin Lawrence movie I was talking about was Blue Streak (1999), which was considered pretty solid at the time, but now shows how tired the genre had become just before The Matrix (1999) reset the bar and invented a new visual language for (American) action movies. Then Bourne happened. And now John Wick.
• Yeah, listen to the Predator director’s commentary as well, it’s real good.
• Do you have a problem with Die Hard? Tweet #fictionhack.

This week we are remembering Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, The Question, Rorshach, and much, much more. Just like the heroes he created and helped develop, Ditko was a mysterious, complex, and principled individual. Today we try to open a little of that up for you.

Ross’ Show Notes

• Here’s a list of characters that Steve Ditko created on Wikipedia. Not all of them had their own titles, of course, but it’s pretty impressive.
• William Sydney Porter’s pen name was O. Henry.
• My history of Marvel Comics is not strictly accurate, but it is the simplest way of thinking about it. Fortunately, there are a lot of good biographies of early comics history. My favourite, for its objectivity, is Sean Howe’s Marvel: The Untold Story.
•  Here’s a sample of Alan Moore’s scriptwriting style, which I don’t think anyone would advise emulating. This is the description for ONE PANEL on the first page of Watchmen. You can find it in the Watchmen Absolute edition.

• Jack Kirby’s character contribution.
• To learn a lot more about page composition and the art behind draftsmanship (which is the word we give to how much a picture actually looks like the thing that it is of), I recommend Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.
• The scene where Reed is knocked out and has a whole off-panel conversation is found in Fantastic Four issue 71, which I talk more about on my blog FF1by1.com! Go ahead and scroll back through some of the other issue to see what I’m trying to describe about Jack Kirby’s work. He illustrated the first 100 issues of FF.
• Here are the Charlton characters along with their Watchmen counterparts:
• Here’s the Zack Snyder/Objectivism post I did for Batman V Superman. It has recently been announced that following Justice League, Snyder will attempt to adapt Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
• I’ll repost a page from the Avenging Planet. It’s not the angriest page, but it is the one that makes most sense as a single page:

What’s this? Ross is the layman and Colin is the expert? Have we entered a mirrorverse? That would explain why both Colin and Ross are wearing dark goatees (Ross has a darker goatee on top of his beard–it’s weird). This week we talk Star Trek!

Ross’ Show Notes

• Star Trek is massive. There have been 7 TV shows (including the Animated Series) totalling incorporating seasons, totalling 740 episodes. Additionally, there have been and a whopping 13 movies.
• Here’s a clip from Star Trek: Next Voyage (known now as The Animated Series). All the voice actors are the show’s original actors, except for Walter Koenig (Chekov), apparently due to budgetary reasons.

• I haven’t even tried to count the Star Trek novels. Here’s a list on Wikipedia, though.
• Star Trek novels have been published continually since 1967 and have had some pretty big names in SF associated with them. James Blish wrote the very first original novel called “Spock Must Die”, as well as episode novelizations. Multi-Hugo Award winner Joe Haldeman followed suit in the Seventies and since then Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Vonda N MacIntyre, and Greg Bear are more award winners who have penned ST novels.
• The best Star Trek novelisation that I’ve read is Star Trek: Federation by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens. It’s a Original Series/Next Generation crossover which shows early Kirk scenes at the academy and also ties in the creator of the warp drive, Zefram Cochrane, and that’s who James Cromwell plays in Star Trek: First Contact, not Scott Bakula in Enterprise, that’s why I got confused. Anyway, 5 stars.

• I still like Star Trek: Generations, though. Doesn’t anyone else?
• Colin says that the Original Series’ (TOS) pilot, The Cage, is not canon, but that is not my understanding. Captain Pike appeared in The Menagerie episode of TOS, and no information given there conflicted with the pilot, in fact, much of it was confirmed. The reason that Pike did not appear later was not a story reason, but because the actor backed out. Pike appears in the novels and was recast as an integral character in the J. J. Abrams reboot. So there.
• Wow. There have been a LOT of fan-made Star Trek episodes and movies! By far my favourite is Star Trek Continues, both in conception and production. It’s a continuation of the Original Series, which works well being super low budget. They’ve even pushed the colours to match TOS, and the make-up and effects work is spot on. They even have a pretty good Shatner. Definitely check it out:

• Colin’s favourite episode is “The Inner Light” season 5, episode 25. The short story I couldn’t remember the name of is An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce. Read it. It’s good. It’s short.
• My favourite episode is season 6, episode 21 called “Frame of Mind”.
• Westworld (1976) is quite well thought of today. IMDB gives it 7/10, Metacritic gives it 77, and Rotten Tomatoes gives it 86% fresh. Which isn’t awful.

Marvel Studios is about to release its 20th movie, Ant-Man and The Wasp! As a long-time comic nerd, that blows my mind. Ant-Man is a very unlikely hero who has been around since the beginning and has a hard time keeping his own series. The Wasp has generally been a tag-along character to him. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy, he’s been one of the most obscure characters picked to headline his own movie. So who is Ant-Man and/or The Wasp? Who are they in the comics, and who are they in the movies?

Ross’ Show Notes

• My Fantastic Four review site is called FF 1 by 1, and it is totally ongoing (even though I’ve been taking a break this year).
• The best info on comic characters (apart from me) is still probably Wikipedia. Here are the entries for Ant-Man and The Wasp.
• Peyton Reed isn’t a name you probably knew before Ant-Man, but he directed the first Bring It On (2000), as well as Yes Man (2008), and every episode of The Weird Al Show (1997). For those alone I will forgive him Down With Love (2003).
• My personal favourite tale featuring (the original) Ant-Man and The Wasp is Kurt Busiek’s 12 issue limited series Avengers Forever. Carlos Pacheco’s art is top tier and although it reaches deep into pre-90s comic lore, it’s friendly for a newcomer.
• I don’t know if I made it clear, but Hope Van Dyne did appear first in Marvel Comics, although not in strict continuity. MC2 (Marvel Comics 2) were a spin-off imprint from the late 1990s, created when Tom DeFalco (one of my personal favourite writers) was removed from marvel as Editor-In-Chief in 1994. Fan outcry (or, let’s say, demand) was such that Marvel gave DeFalco creative control over a small group of titles, MC2, which essentially showed how the key marvel characters would have progressed under his supervision. Spider-Girl, with Ron Frenz, was the forerunner success and became known as the comic they couldn’t kill after fan outcry (it really was an outcry this time) forced Marvel to rescind several cancellations–eventually going on to be Marvel’s longest-running female-titled comic, hitting 100 issues. Other titles were The Fantastic Five, J2, Wild Thing, and A-Next. Hope Van Dyne, as the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, appeared in issue 7 of A-Next as The Red Queen, leader of the Revengers, squaring off against Cassandra Lang (that name familiar?) a size-changing hero called Stinger.
• I’m supposed to put links out and embeds into my notes for SEO purposes. Here’s a trailer, I guess: