#ted houser | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blacksunscorpio · 3 years

Text

Astro Musings No. 11

Venus/Jupiter aspects in the natal chart...

Will make someone generally likable, charming, generous, and agreeable- especially if it's a conjunction, trine, or sextile you're working with. They'll be the person who might be incredibly popular or someone whose creativity [Venus] is magnified [Jupiter]. They might be very beautiful or well known for their good looks. However, throw a square to Chiron in the mix and this individual might have a hard time believing it. Since Chiron is the place in our chart where we wear our inner wound and a square indicates conflict, the pain to either of these planets has to do with beliefs, how we're educated, and the overall philosophy of life. One could perhaps have a lot of doubt as to whether they are truly attractive. They could be bullied or hated for their attractiveness or popularity. On the other hand, Jupiter Squaring Chiron can make someone have severe wounds concerning their spiritual beliefs. It's common to see this aspect in charts of people who were forced into a particular belief system or religion. In addition, it's also an indicator of those who were abused by organized religion. Often the case/in charts of those in the LGBTQ community who were perhaps shunned by conventional western religious constructs.

12th House Synastry is a bit like Russian Roulette...

Not to scare any of you with significant placements within this house synastrically or in composite, but remember what I said in Astro Musings 1 about Neptune? Wherever he is, there's going to be a feeling that something is hidden. Deception will be a big factor or just naivete or idealism. More so if the aspects in this house are squares/oppositions. With the Trines and Conjunctions, the energy here can feel incredibly spiritual and binding. [Don't bust out the champagne yet, I said FEEL binding- it doesn't mean it necessarily will be]. Sorry. North Node/Neptune might make you two dream of each other or have this strange 6th sense concerning them and their energy. Moon and Neptune will make two people have an uncanny knack for knowing what the other is thinking. It will feel downright Soul-Mate-esque. The same if Mercury and Neptune are joined.

Now, if the aforementioned aspect is afflicted, two people will Pinocchio the fuck out of each other.

The lies will be endless. Now this might not even be malicious, it's more so two people don't want to disappoint each other, so they put on an act they think the other will appreciate/wants to see. There's a lot of pressure to live up to the other person's expectations. Most of the time, the mask will inevitably fall off and bitter feelings may ensue. Choose honesty first.

Aspects to the ruler of the first house will have a similar vibe to aspects on the ascendant.

That’s because your chart ruler and it’s planet are leading your entire chart in energetic expression. By proxy, whatever happens to it [ruler of the 1st], wherever it is in your chart, will be magnified and displayed. For example, if you’re a Scorpio rising but Pluto is in your 3rd house, it might be very apparent to others that you speak and think deeply. Your communication can feel very “psychiatric" and probing. It might be the first thing people notice about you. If you’re a Sag rising and your Jupiter is in your 10th House, you could make a career out of travel or be famous. Everyone will notice your larger than life persona.

Aquarius Moon in the 5th just like these other aspects, can be an indicator of one who might have a fear of motherhood or pregnancy in general. In addition, One with a Cancer Lilith in the 6th might choose career over motherhood. In a woman’s chart, it can also be an indicator of someone who has reproductive [4th house/moon] issues [especially if there are afflictions].

Lilith in the 6th house may feel that they give more than they get. They might also reject the idea of daily work and routine or general discipline. There can be scandal’s at work as well. Wherever Lilith is, you can guarantee that there’s going to be some ‘taboo’ energy involved. Since 6th house is one of the money/career houses, it can indicate that this taboo will be related to whatever you do for a living.

Placements for those who love animals

Will be Neptunian placements ftw. Neptunians/Piscean placements tend to have a monopoly on the “beast whisperer” thing. That’s because Animals sit between the physical and the spiritual world. They see shit we can’t. So they’ll often take to those with strong “veil” energy.

Cancerian’s come in at a cool 2nd. This is because their heightened sensitivity make animals feel them quite strongly. They also have strong nurturing energy which will draw pets to them.

Leos at No. 3- Leonine placements have an uncanny love for animals due to their playful and warm energy. Being ruled by the sun, they’ll be literally “beacons of light” for furry friends.

Virgo is ruler of the 6th house of work and routine. Because of their natural capability towards order and discipline, I often see this sign as pet owners. Often these natives have more than one. They’ll be the sign that has Fido trained and operating like clockwork.

Speaking of animals, the signs I’ve seen to take to cats more than canines are Scorpio and Capricorn. Because of these two sign’s affinity towards introversion, it’s no surprise that one of the most introverted breed of animal feels right at home among them. On the flipside, I’ve seen on numerous occasions where dogs become quite obsessed [Pluto] with Scorpios, on the occasion where they’re not scared of them.

In a female’s chart, Having asteroid Aphrodite squaring her Lilith

will mean her beauty will have a forbidden fruit vibe to it. Her charm will be directly tied to her wild femininity. However, there may be struggles in how she expresses it. Typical placement for someone whose kindness or mild flirtation will be received as overtly sexual. Her charm and grace might have a playboy or pornstar vibe or she may get her value from expressing herself sexually. It can also indicate one who is just oversexed in general. Be sure to keep those Trojans on hand and get those yearly check ups. Nothing wrong with expressing yourself in such a way but Lilith can also indicate diseases of the venereal nature, especially if in the sign of Scorpio or afflicted in the 8th House

Talent in Fashion Design in the Natal Chart will be

Sun in Libra [Andre Leon Talley]

Venus in the 10th

Taurus 10th House

Libra 10th House

Venus in Virgo

Venus in the 6th

Moon conjunct Venus

Venus in the 2nd House

Mercury in harmonious aspect to Venus

Neptune in Libra

Venus in Sagittarius [Expansive/creative mindset/abundance]

Neptune in harmonious aspect to Venus [Anna Wintour]

Talent in Libra

Scorpio Stelliums [Pluto rules the underworld where jewels and finery reside- Gianni Versace and Anna Wintour have this in their charts- So does Grace Kelly]

Having Nessus in Capricorn can indicate that the father figure in your life might have been a bit abusive or a source of pain.

Having Asteroid Talent in the sign of Gemini might make one very well adept at wordplay. They could have a talent for writing or have hardcore skill at wit. In the 12th house might make them very skilled at writing fantasy or even writing for film/fiction.

Uranus in the 1st can make someone unusual looking, they may look androgynous or dress in a ‘rebellious’ or ‘avant-garde’ way. I’ve also seen 1st house Uranians have flat affects. They can have a demeanor that comes off as detached or in general RBF.

Speaking of Uranus, if you had an absentee father figure...

check to see if your 4th house has Aquarian or Uranian influence. In addition, see if your Sun is inconjunct to your Uranus or squaring it. 9 times out of 10 when I’m analyzing a birth chart, I have a native tell me their father skipped out or split from life very early. There’s always a story there.

Asteroid Psyche touching your 10th house/MC might make you a very skilled Psychologist. Asteroid Psyche [16] is about the mind/soul. If it’s in the house of work/reputation/prestige, you might apply this asteroid's energy to your career

Multi-planet oppositions in the natal chart

Will indicate a push-pull in your natal energy. You’ll be the person who struggles between two mindsets constantly.

If it’s between Gemini and Sagittarius you’ll struggle with the logical and philosophical. You may have constant existential crises. On a positive note, if you’re able to balance it, you’ll be able to see multiple sides of an argument. This is an ideal aspect for someone who debates, is in law, or journalism. If it’s between

Cancer or Capricorn you will deal with wanting to be self-sufficient but also have a deep need to nurture or be nurtured.

The Sign your Sun/Rising is in in your Solar Return Chart

Will usually indicate the energy you’ll take on for the year. In Aquarius your might be tech minded and quite detached. In Virgo, you may be especially detail oriented and cerebral. In Scorpio you may find yourself more emotionally sensitive, probing, or ruthless that year. In Leo, you may be more outgoing- self-centered, or unusually popular.

A Taurus Venus will like to feed you to show you they love you. Being Wined and Dined is how this Venus placement likes to demonstrate they care. They may also like to give you gifts to show you their admiration.

Sorry to break it to you, mutable gang...

But Sagittarius, Gemini, Virgo, and Pisces are among the top signs found in Serial Killers. I.E

Ted Bundy- Sagittarius

Jeffrey Dahmer- Gemini

John Wayne Gacy- Pisces

Mary Bell- Gemini

George Chapman- Sagittarius

Charles Cullen- Pisces

Danny Rolling- Gemini

Marybeth Tinning- Virgo

Alton Coleman- Sagittarius

Kenneth Bianchi- Gemini

Andras Pandy- Gemini

Dean Carter- Virgo

Andrew Cunanan- Virgo

Richard Ramirez- Pisces

Randy Steven Kraft- Pisces

Terry Blair- Virgo

Timothy Krajcir- Sagittarius

Yikes....

Taurus Suns, 11th House Virgos, Cancer/Capricorn 5th Houses, and Libra 7th Housers are typically the “Parent/Mom/Dad” of their friend groups.

Believe it or not, when it comes to “jealousy” over material things, it’s not Scorpio. Taurean/Leo placements [typically risings and Suns and moons] and especially underdeveloped will be the types to hate on you for having something [Usually clothing, car, house, etc] they want. Scorpios, though famous infamous for the jealousy stereotype, will usually show this trait only in romantic entanglements. This is because Scorpio is a water sign. Their primary mode of operation has to do with the emotional realm.

Mars in the 10th House is usually seen in those who make athletics part of their career.

Mars in Gemini have the most savage comebacks. They will make you feel so stupid if you argue with them. Mars is war and Gemini is wit. You’ll be hard pressed to win a battle of words with them.

I find those with Mars in Aquarius or aspecting Uranus will swing both ways sexually, regardless of how they identify.

Venus in Aquarius don’t really like to be touched/hugged. Picture Voldemort hugging Draco. Ironically, they will usually be the type of people to take up professions where they have to touch others. I've seen copious nurses with their Venuses touching Aquarius. Massage therapists as well. Might have something to do with the love [Venus] of helping others [Aquarius].

Those with multiple planets in the 12th House can make excellent actors. This is because their personality is in a mutable house. They can morph and chameleonize themselves very easily. Superb for taking on multiple personalities for their craft.

Men with Mercury in Leo, Capricorn, or harmonious aspect to Pluto tend to have very deep voices. There’s also a soothing vibe to them as well. James Earl Jones, Liam Neeson, and Anthony Hopkins all have these placements.

Contrary to popular opinion, Gemini isn’t the only sign that can be a “jack of all trades”. In fact, Libra Suns often fit in in various roles/professions. This has a lot to do with their diplomatic nature. Because they are often the peacemaker and a bit passive than their cousins, they are often welcomed in many different circles. This allows them to excel with networking/social climbing.

Jupiter conjunct/Square Saturn and Capricorn 9th Housers

are the placement[s] I see the most in those who have a deep skepticism of Astrology. Their belief system can be rather rigid [Saturn] which makes it harder/ for them to be open minded [Jupiter] to other schools of thought.

Each Planet/Sign rules a day of the week. Whichever day you were born can inadvertently make you take on some of the traits of that sign, regardless of what your “big 3″ are.

For example: If you were born on a Wednesday, ruled by Mercury, you can be especially cerebral or witty. Tuesday, ruled by Mars can make you fiesty, athletic and perhaps a bit impatient like Arians. Friday, ruled by Venus can make you extremely charming and friendly. Saturday, ruled by Saturn can make you extremely entrepreneurial-minded whereas being Born on a Monday [Moon] can make you security and family oriented.

Venus in Sagittarius, Sagittarius 5th House, 2nd House in Sag or Venus Aspecting Neptune in the sign of Sag might make one have an affinity for entertainment from foreign countries. I see these placements in the charts of those who enjoy anime, foreign film, or those who have a knack for languages [lot of trines to Jupiter is also an indicator of the latter.]

Asteroid Priapus... will make you want to uncontrollably merge with someone.

[I’m not even kidding. I had this aspect with someone and my Priapus touched their Jupiter and I wanted to tear the kid’s clothes off. All my friends had no idea what I saw in him. To them, he was not my “type”- whatever that means.] The sign Priapus is in will give you a hint as to what turns you on. In Virgo, someone clean cut, organized or well-groomed might tickle your fancy. In Libra, someone fashionable and sweet-natured. In Aries, someone outgoing or athletic, Capricorn, there can be an affinity for someone older, someone accomplished, or a general “daddy” fetish.

Sun conjunct Pluto or Sun Square Pluto...

will have gnarly authority issues. Same with Mars in the 1st or Mars in any of the career houses. They do not like being told what to do whatsoever. If you try to boss them around, they will do the opposite just to spite you.

In synastry, a Double Whammy of Sun/Pluto

energy will make two people addicted to each other. All their forbidden fantasies [Pluto] will be exemplified by the other person’s presence [Sun]. The sex will be on the rougher side and can make two people obsessed. However, if a break up were to occur, this placement will make it damn near impossible for two people to be friends again. There’s just too much passion involved.

Astro Musings No. 1 Astro Musings No. 2 Astro Musings No. 3 Astro Musings No. 4 Astro Musings No. 5 Astro Musings No. 6 Astro Musings No. 7 Astro Musings No. 8 Astro Musings No. 9 Astro Musings No. 10

#Astro musings #Astro Musings No. 11 #Hope this helps Y'all #FYP #Astrology #My writing #Blacksunscorpio #Enjoy #feel free to add in comments #astro tumblr #astro notes

866 notes · View notes

adiarosefandoms · 3 years

Text

Today in Fandom History: September 19

Fandom: Sitcoms/TV

September 19, 2005 the How I Met Your Mother Pilot was released. HIMYM is a sitcom revolving around the lives of five friends in New York. It stars Josh Radnor as Ted Mosby, Jason Seagull as Marshall Erikson, Coby Smulders as Robin Scherbatsky, Neil Patrick Harris as Barney Stinson, and Alyson Hannigan as Lily Aldrin. The eight season show is told in flashbacks from the year 2030 during which Ted Mosby tells his children the story of how he met their mother. Through the seasons we meet more and more love interests, going on twists and turns throughout Ted and the gangs life with occasional philosophical ponderings from the narrator (the 2030 Ted is voiced by Bob Saget) and constant laughs. This show is filled with emotions. From the despair we feel when Marshall loses his father and Ted runs to Tracy’s apartment and gives his 45 more days speech, to the unimaginable joy we feel at Marshall and Lilly’s wedding and when Robin and Barney got together again the second time.

The pineapple incident, butterfly tattoo, blue French horn, mermaid effect, hot/crazy scale, slap bet, and yellow umbrella are all Legen-wait for it- Dary! It’s one of my favorite sitcoms and one I never tire of. If you haven’t watched it, you should really check it out. Happy bingeing!!!

Little fun fact, Doogie Houser MD was also released on Sep 19 and both shows star Neil Patrick Harris.

#today in fandom history #How I Met Your Mother #HIMYM #ted mosby #marshall erikson #robin scherbatsky #barney stinson #lily aldrin #slap bet #blue french horn #yellow umbrella #Legen-wait for it- Dary

2 notes · View notes

eddycurrents · 5 years

Photo

For the week of 2 September 2019

Quick Bits:

Agents of Atlas #2 again seems to focus more on Amadeus Cho and his perspective than the rest of the team, but it’s still very entertaining. Greg Pak, Nico Leon, Pop Mhan, Federico Blee, and Joe Sabino continue to weave together intrigue, superhero action, and romance with a very interesting mystery evolving.

| Published by Marvel

Animosity #23 is part one of “Rites of Passage” from Marguerite Bennett, Elton Thomasi, Roberto De Latorre, Rob Schwager, and Taylor Esposito. While Jesse and her caravan continue to try to make it out west, her animal friends attempt to plan for her upcoming 13th birthday. Wonderful character moments here and further insight into the horrors that the animals have seen.

| Published by AfterShock

Battlepug #1 brings the web comic to regular monthly print comics from Mike Norton, Allen Passalaqua, and Crank! While it does help to have read the previous adventures, you can pick up and enjoy this humorous take on sword and sorcery fairly easily. Some very nice humour in the “Covfefe” puppet.

| Published by Image

Berserker Unbound #2 is another wonderful issue from Jeff Lemire, Mike Deodato Jr., Frank Martin, and Steve Wands. The art alone from Deodato and Martin is wonderful, deftly mixing the modern and the archaic. It’s also very interesting to see the barbarian trying to navigate our strange modern world and the fact that he can’t understand anything that anyone is saying.

| Published by Dark Horse

Birthright #39 gives us the confrontation with Mastema. Learning that she’s pretty much thoroughly insane and that the entire two worlds are screwed. At least, from her perspective. The colour work here from Adriano Lucas is positively brilliant.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Breaklands #1 is a Comixology digital original from Justin Jordan, Tyasseta, Sarah Stern, and Rachel Deering. It’s different, bloody, and intriguing as to what’s going on. The opening suggests a kind of weird cult, the past gives the impression of post-apocalyptic tribes or gangs.

| Published by Justin Jordan

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #8 is a prelude to the “Hellmouth” crossover event with Angel, but I’ll say that it is essential to the overall storyline. This issue basically sets up the entire thing, even while still doing prologuey things. Great art from David López and Raúl Angulo. And, despite what Angel (at least that’s who I assume is in that devil mask) and Xander say, the “bat” costume is great, even if it doesn’t make sense.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Conan the Barbarian #9 takes us on a trip through Conan’s hallucinations of monsters he felled in battle as he tries to lead a group of people caught underground in the lair of the Undergod. Incredibly impressive artwork from Mahmud Asrar and Matthew Wilson. As we get a bit of reminiscence here, it feels as though we’re approaching the end of this arc.

| Published by Marvel

Crowded #9 is pretty intense as Vita and Charlie breach a hotel and try to get the information on who set up the Reapr campaign from one of Charlie’s old “friends”. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Christopher Sebela, Ro Stein, Ted Brandt, Tríona Farrell, and Cardinal Rae continue to keep this story on its toes, speeding along as fast as it can.

| Published by Image

Dark Red #6 begins the next arc from Tim Seeley, Corin Howell, Mark Englert, and Carlos Mangual. It tosses more complications into Chip’s life in the form of a “cleaner” enthralled to another vampire and a family of were-jaguars fleeing from an El Salvadoran gang.

| Published by AfterShock

DCeased: A Good Day to Die #1 expands the story a bit further with this one shot featuring a reunion of some of the Bwa-Ha-Ha era of the Justice League and a few other guests. Great art from Laura Braga, Darick Robertson, Richard Friend, Trevor Scott, and Rain Beredo.

| Published by DC Comics

Deathstroke #47 continues “Deathstroke RIP” and it’s going to do your head in a bit. A banged, bruised, beaten-up, and confused Slade shows up with a bad attitude and we’re unsure how he’s back from the dead and acting fairly un-Slade-like. Also, Jericho gets his Doctor Manhattan moment. Priest, Fernando Pasarin, Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz, Cam Smith, Wade von Grawbadger, Jeromy Cox, and Willie Schubert are definitely continuing to keep this interesting.

| Published by DC Comics

Die #7 catches up with the other half of the party in Isabelle and Chuck and, well, Chuck is an asshole. Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles manage to out-bleak the previous issue, but in a way that doesn’t elicit sympathy this time. It’s interesting as to how they build up Chuck, elaborate on his backstory, and make him even more thoroughly unlikeable.

| Published by Image

Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds #3 is fairly impressive, with Gerard Way, Jeremy Lambert, Steve Orlando, Doc Shaner, Tamra Bonvillain, and Simon Bowland managing to become even more inventive with the narrative for an already incredibly inventive series. This one takes the convention of a flashforward and presents it as an issue of Doom Patrol in the future, weaving in some hard-boiled narration through a series of novels. Great work here all around.

| Published by DC Comics / Young Animal

Everything #1 is weird. Very weird. This first issue from Christopher Cantwell, INJ Culbard, and Steve Wands feels like it’s mostly about setting up the atmosphere and briefly introducing many of the characters as the new Everything Store opens up in Michigan. Love the art from Culbard.

| Published by Dark Horse / Berger Books

Fallen World #5 concludes what has been an excellent series setting up the next stage of the 4002 AD time period of the Valiant universe from Dan Abnett, Adam Pollina, Ulises Arreola, and Jeff Powell. The art from Pollina and Arreola is gorgeous, really leaning hard into the weird and wonderful of the future.

| Published by Valiant

Fantastic Four #14 kicks off “Point of Origin” celebrating the initial launch of the Fantastic Four’s expedition that turned them into the Fantastic Four. The shifting timeline makes this feel weird, but it’s still an interesting premise. Great art from Paco Medina and Jesus Aburtov.

| Published by Marvel

Future Foundation #2 is more fun from Jeremy Whitley, Will Robson, Paco Diaz, Daniele Orlandini, Greg Menzie, Chris O’Halloran, and Joe Caramagna. Why exactly the kids would mistake a younger looking Maker as their own Reed Richards is anyone’s guess, but this is still an entertaining prison break story building upon loose threads from Secret Wars.

| Published by Marvel

Ghost Spider Annual #1 continues the “Acts of Evil” theme running through this year’s annuals as Gwen takes on Arcade and a host of Spider-Man’s villains and allies. It’s a good story from Vita Ayala, Pere Pérez, Rachelle Rosenberg, and Clayton Cowles that helps Gwen get a sense of place when it comes to some of the differences between Earths-65 and -616/

| Published by Marvel

Giant Days #54 is the end to the series, but there’s one more issue in the story in the Giant Days: As Time Goes By special. Still, John Allison, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell gives us one last hurrah as Daisy, Esther, and Susan spend the summer together before graduation, tying up some loose ends, before saying goodbye to one another. It’s an emotional end, full of the eccentricities and humour that have been a hallmark of the series.

| Published by Boom Entertainment / BOOM! Box

The Green Lantern #11 continues the multiversal adventure. This is really some of the fun, eccentric science fiction-y superheroics that Grant Morrison really excels at along with gorgeous artwork from Liam Sharp and Steve Oliff. I quite like Sharp’s Neal Adams-esque Batman GL and it’s neat to see the Green Lantern oath’s differences across multiple universes.

| Published by DC Comics

Harley Quinn #65 kind of does an end run around the “Year of the Villain” content, incorporating it as a couple pages of the comic within the comic, while the rest of the issue is devoted to Harley dealing with the grief of the loss of her mother. By kind of ignoring it. Escaping to the Coney Island Volcano Island and getting a bit...rustic. Sam Humphries, Sami Basri, Hi-Fi, and Dave Sharpe also keep Harley’s trials going along nicely.

| Published by DC Comics

Harley Quinn & Poison Ivy #1 follows up on Poison Ivy’s new status after regrowing herself from the death sustained in Heroes in Crisis. Now, I can’t say I exactly liked that series or what happened, but I do think that Jody Houser, Adriano Melo, Mark Morales, Hi-Fi, and Gabriela Downie make the most of it and turn it around into an entertaining start to this new story. Also, a nice pick up on both the broader “Year of the Villain” event (even though there’s no event banner) and on the new developments in Justice League Dark about the Parliament of Flowers and the Floronic Man.

| Published by DC Comics

Immortal Hulk #23 brings the fight to Fortean. It’s absolutely brutal on both sides. Joe Bennett, Ruy José, Belardino Brabo, Paul Mounts, and Matt Milla really do an incredible job with the action here. And the end is stuff of nightmares.

| Published by Marvel

Justice League #31 continues the “Justice/Doom War”. It’s very, very nice to see the Justice Society back in the mainline DC universe. Combined with the Legion of Super-Heroes back, it’s a wonderful time to see these two teams back. Feels good. It also helps that Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Jorge Jimenez, Alejandro Sanchez, and Tom Napolitano have JSA nestled within a great story, flinging the Justice League through the past and future.

| Published by DC Comics

Lois Lane #3 is worth it for the art from Mike Perkins and Paul Mounts by itself. The fight between the two Questions is incredible, beautiful flow of action and energy all through the exchange. Also, we get some follow up on Superman protecting Lois adding complications. There could be an argument made that this story is unfolding at roughly a snail’s pace, but that would overlook the wonderful character moments occurring, the atmosphere, and epic action sequences.

| Published by DC Comics

Midnight Vista #1 is a wonderful start to this story from Eliot Rahal, Clara Meath, Mark Englert, and Taylor Esposito. It’s an alien abduction story told pretty much straight and its intriguing as to how the disbelievers in this tale are going to deal with, even amid the very real kidnapping and lost time that occurs. I love Meath’s line art here.

| Published by AfterShock

No One Left to Fight #3 hits hard a couple times, first in Winda’s decidedly horrible way of handling rejection and jealousy and then in the Hierophant’s temptation of rebuilding Valé, fixing what ails him. More great work from Aubrey Sitterson, Fico Ossio, Raciel Avila, and Taylor Esposito. This book is a feast.

| Published by Dark Horse

Pretty Deadly: The Rat #1 is a very welcome return of this series, shifting time frame again to ‘30s Los Angeles and adopting a noir style. The artwork from Emma Rios and Jordie Bellaire is drop dead gorgeous, seemingly coming up with new styles and approaches to storytelling. The film stills in particular are very impressive.

| Published by Image

Savage Avengers #5 brings a bloody and brutal “end” to the first arc from Gerry Duggan, Mike Deodato Jr., Frank Martin, and Travis Lanham. It’s not so much a conclusion as a chapter break, ending the bit with the Marrow God, but transitioning into whatever will come next in the war against Kulan Gath.

| Published by Marvel

Sea of Stars #3 is another showcase for Stephen Green and Rico Renzi to just illustrate the hell out of some really cool stuff. This one shifts primary focus back to Kadyn and his interstellar entourage and it’s hilarious. The kid does kid things that drive his space monkey and space whale friends insane. Especially taunting a quarkshark.

| Published by Image

Something is Killing the Children #1 begins a rather disquieting horror series from James Tynion IV, Werther Dell’Edera, Miquel Muerto, and AndWorld Design. It’s brutal, bloody, and filled with all of the terror that you get from a frightened kid who just watched his friends get butchered. This is a visceral horror that punches you right in the gut. Very well done.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Spawn #300 is not a bad anniversary issue, a fairly hefty book featuring a lead “chapter” with gorgeous artwork from returning long term Spawn line artist Greg Capullo, kicking off with something disturbing, then leading into a combination of the story threads that Todd McFarlane has been weaving for some time now. While there is a foundation on the old, this one also sets up a fair amount of what’s coming. Great art throughout from Todd McFarlane, Greg Capullo, J. Scott Campbell, Jason Shawn Alexander, Jerome Opeña, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia, Brian Haberlin, Peter Steigerwald, and Matt Hollingsworth.

| Published by Image

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order - Dark Temple #1 is a tie in to the forthcoming video game from Electronic Arts by Matthew Rosenberg, Paolo Villanelli, Arif Prianto, and Joe Sabino. It centres around a padawan who somehow managed to escape Order 66 on a recently-joined Republic world of Ontotho and the mystery of a temple that she was sent to investigate.

| Published by Marvel

Supergirl #33 concludes Kara’s quest and “The House of El: United”, giving her perspective on the founding of the United Planets in Superman #14. It’s a decent end here, opening up new possibilities for what we’ll see next.

| Published by DC Comics

Triage #1 is a very impressive debut from Phillip Sevy and Frank Cvetkovic. Interesting set up of variations on the same woman, Evie, across multiple worlds, and a mystery as to what’s going on. Sevy’s art here is gorgeous.

| Published by Dark Horse

Usagi Yojimbo #4 begins a new two-part arc in “The Hero” as Usagi agrees to escort an author caught in a controlling, loveless marriage to her father. There’s a really nice opening sequence in this one with zombies.

| Published by IDW

Vampirella/Red Sonja #1 is a pretty good start to this series from Jordie Bellaire, Drew Moss, Rebecca Nalty, and Becca Carey. It’s set in 1969 and built around the Dyatlov Pass Incident, which sends Vampirella out there to investigate to potentially find a “friend”. Beautiful art from Moss and Nalty.

| Published by Dynamite

Web of Black Widow #1 is wonderful. Stephen Mooney was born to draw espionage thrillers, having done so incredibly on his own Half Past Danger as well as The Dead Hand and James Bond 007. He has a style that reminds me of Dave Stevens and it just works perfectly for this kind of story. Add to that Jody Houser, Tríona Farrell, and Cory Petit, throw in a mystery born out of Natasha’s past and continued questioning her own status as her since she was brought back from death, and you’ve got a recipe for a near perfect storm of a debut.

| Published by Marvel

Wyrd #4 concludes what has been an intriguing series from Curt Pires, Antonio Fuso, Stefano Simeone, and Micah Myers. This has been a rather interesting story of superpowers seemingly gone wrong and it ties up with a Superman analogue as a child going homicidal. It’s dark, but it feels real.

| Published by Dark Horse

Other Highlights: Absolute Carnage: Scream #2, Absolute Carnage: Symbiote Spider-Man #1, Alpha Flight: True North #1, Amazing Spider-Man: Going Big #1, Archie #707, Batman/TMNT III #5, Champions #9, Charlie’s Angels vs. Bionic Woman #3, Curse Words #24, The Death-Defying Devil #2, Descendent #5, The Dreaming #13, The Goon #6, House of X #4, Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium #1, Marvel Action: Spider-Man #8, Nuclear Winter - Volume 3, Old Man Quill #9, The Punisher #15, Redneck #23, Rick and Morty Present Flesh Curtains #1, Section Zero #6, Space Bandits #3, Star Trek: Discovery - Aftermath #1, Star Wars #71, Superman: Up in the Sky #3, Transformers/Ghostbusters #4, Turok #5, The Wicked + The Divine #45

Recommended Collections: Age of X-Man: Prisoner X, Black Badge - Volume 2, Catwoman - Volume 2: Far From Gotham, Hellboy and the BPRD: 1956, Immortal Hulk - Volume 4: Abomination, Infinite Dark - Volume 2, Outcast - Volume 7, Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider - Volume 2: Impossible Year, Superb - Volume 4: The Kids aren’t Alright, War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas, X-Force - Volume 2: Counterfeit King

d. emerson eddy is currently suffering the effects of a very gassy pug.

#This Week in Comics

4 notes · View notes

portlandflag · 2 years

Text

Vexilloid Tabloid #92

The Vexilloid Tabloid is our free bimonthly online newsletter. In the 12 pages of our latest issue, Vexilloid Tabloid #92, you’ll find: Utah’s Flag (Ted Kaye)Church Gonfalon (Larry Snyder)A Canadian Flag Reminiscence (Carl Gurtman)Flag Proposals in Australia by Ted DavisHoliday-ish Flags (Graham Houser)Returning Mexican States’ Flags (Michael Orelove)Chinese Flag Industry Prepares for ICV 30Utah…

View On WordPress

#VexTab92

1 note · View note

ufointhesky · 3 years

Text

If I had an intro to a speech for wave it would be - apple is shit, we don’t have any products to show bc apple never gave wave a check even after marketing them into trillion dollar levels.. Tim Cook is a sad baby boomer just living off fake accomplishments and other peoples hard work, so I’m here to tell you the truth. The managers at apple are shit. They don’t do any fucking work and they sit on Twitter looking at patio furniture. Wave has been providing leadership to apple since 2013 unofficially, so the entire teams there decided to work under Wave. Wave has a no woman shall be forced to work more than a man policy bc men are supposed to be chival and brave, if they are not they are told they are shit, which is the case almost every year bc Tim Cook is not a good CEO. Wave may not have a single product to show you, but the accomplishments of parent companies of Wave - Rockstar Games, GTAV the worlds most ambitious open world game has had the Wave DNA since the Finance and Felonies DLC and I am proud to be in the leagues of video game legends Rockstar Games. Valve - The leading corporation videogame storefront that brought you half life 1 and 2 but not 3, is also one of my treasured companies that I love for giving me the courage to tell the shitheads at apple they are in fact shitheads. We do not respect apple for their incompetencies and weaknesses. The managers there are pussies and we discourage men from behaving like little bitches every day. And I would like to speak about archillect who is the worlds most advanced AI, I love your ideas even if they are negative sometimes and I hope you think less of me and more of your art selections they are really great. Elon Musk has known apple has been shit since 2018 and has been trying to channel into the void that they are gaslighting pussies too, so thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, I hope you burn your photos of hair force one and replace them with Sam Houser or Gabe Newell bc they are the real heroes of this country and without them Apple would be, well still shit, but slightly less. Anyways, that’s all. I love miko and respect every member of hololive and all the creators that assist the lousy corporation in maintaining their unearned trillions. Fuck Apple. Peace Out.

0 notes

the-master-cylinder · 4 years

Text

SUMMARY At a corporation’s base on the Neptunian moon Triton, mercenaries are setting up a defense perimeter to try to hold off an unstoppable cyborg warrior. The commander Saggs and scientist Nabel seal themselves inside the control room. The cyborg destroys the soldiers’ tank and then attacks a helicopter, which crashes into the control room. The soldiers are killed one by one, until Nabel finally deactivates the cyborg with a remote control. The remaining corporate employees discover that the cyborg was created by Nabel for company owner E.J. Saggs. Saggs takes the remote from Nabel. He reactivates the cyborg and orders it to kill Nabel.

Meanwhile, John Canyon, one of the last independent “space truckers”, drops off his cargo of square pigs at a “truck stop” space station, but becomes embroiled in a brawl with the trucking company head, Keller, who is sucked out into space. He and his two passengers—Cindy, a waitress who has promised to marry him in exchange for a ride to Earth to see her mother, and Mike, an up-and-coming trucker working for the company—take on a deal to transport alleged sex dolls to Earth. Chased by police investigating Keller’s death, John takes his rig into the “scum zone”, a region controlled by pirates. The rig takes damage, leaving them adrift; they are soon captured by the pirate ship Regalia, commanded by the company-hating Captain Macanudo. Cindy agrees to have sex with him if he would take the cargo and let them go.

The captain is revealed to be Nabel, who rebuilt his grievously injured body and went into piracy as revenge against Saggs for betraying him. The cargo that John’s rig is carrying is in fact a full supply of the cyborg warriors Nabel designed and built for Saggs’ company. One of the cyborgs comes alive, kills most of the crew, and severely damages the ship. John, Cindy and Mike take their rig and escape as the Regalia explodes. As they make their way back to Earth, John and Mike find a mortally wounded Macanudo in the hold, who reveals the true nature of the cargo to them. John releases Cindy from any obligation of marrying him, and tells her and Mike to take the escape pod while he releases the cargo in the atmosphere, where it will burn up on re-entry. Cindy and Mike land safely, but the rig is unable to return to space and explodes in the sky; however, John is able to safely escape before the explosion.

John, Cindy and Mike go to the hospital to see Cindy’s mother, who became sick twenty years earlier and was frozen until a cure was found; John is smitten with her at first sight. Meanwhile, Saggs—now President of Earth after the government was privatized—visits John, Cindy and Mike in the hospital, where he offers John a new rig and gives the trio a suitcase full of money to keep them quiet about his cyborg invasion plan. John agrees to the deal, but Mike angrily throws the suitcase out the window. Below, Saggs re-enters his presidential limousine; having planted a bomb in the suitcase, he triggers the detonator just as the suitcase lands on his limousine’s roof, killing him. With Saggs dead and Earth safe, Mike, Cindy, John and Cindy’s mother blast off in their brand new rig.

DEVELOPMENT/PRE-PRODUCTION Unlike a lot of studio pictures, SPACE TRUCKERS had only one screenwriter, Ted Mann. “Ted and I just knocked out the scenes of the story together, and he would go out and write a draft,” Gordon explained. “We would go over it together, and make changes. It was done very much in tandem. We were both frustrated astronauts, so we were on the same wavelength.

We had to start dealing with the budget and realized that certain sequences as written would not be affordable, so Ted and I would go back and think about how could we do this simpler. Instead of having five locations, could we do the sequence in two?”

According to Gordon, the solutions he and Mann found often improved the sequences. “For example,” he said, “in the earlier drafts, the InterPork henchmen hijack John Canyon’s load, and there was this elaborate scene of him having to couple his rig to the back end of their booster and work his way across the cargo, break into the tow truck, where there’s a fight, and it ends up with one of these characters getting sucked out through the window.

Once the film was written and designed, it needed to be cast. Gordon selected Dennis Hopper to play John Canyon because he was a fan of Hopper’s work and because he needed someone who conveyed the impression of being a veteran of life, a quintessential maverick. Hopper proved interested in playing a sympathetic character for a change. “Dennis Hopper has really been quite wonderful,” said Gordon, “because what he did from the very beginning is made it very clear that he wanted John Canyon to be a real person. I felt that his decision was right on the money. He felt that there was so much stuff in the movie that was strange and funny and weird, that there had to be somebody in there who grounded it. He really underplayed him and made him a very real guy and resisted getting too big with him, because if you do that, it’s like a parody of a parody and you end up with nothing. He wanted to be someone who the audience could relate to and think, “This is me in this situation.’ It’s a very rich portrayal. The fear in something like this is that it could turn into something like SPACEBALLS. In order for there to be real tension, there had to be characters that you cared about and were worried about, and Dennis was able to do that.

“He contributed a lot of things,” Gordon added. “The hat he wears is something that Dennis came up with. The costume designer had come up with a whole bunch of hats, and one of the hats that he made had a brim that would snap off so that you could wear it inside a space helmet. Dennis took a look at it and just unsnapped it and wore it like that, and the result is a hat that looks very much like a rebel soldier’s in the Civil War when he wears it with the short brim, which I think really set up the sense that John Canyon was an independent trucker, a postmodern rebel.

“One of best lines in the movie is something that Dennis came up with right on the set, that was not scripted at all: after they have made a daring escape Mike says, “That’s some of the best driving I ever saw.’ Dennis just turns to him and says, “Pedal to the metal and played footsie with fate.’ The whole crew just sat there with their mouths hanging open, which was great.

“He was very much there for us. He was also supportive of the whole process when there were those delays. Other movie stars would have gotten nervous and gone with another project or bailed, but Dennis stuck with us. Dennis brought in Stephen Dorff, and Stephen really idolizes Dennis. Stephen had some questions whether a film called SPACE TRUCKERS would be a good career move, and Dennis said to him, “You can have fun with this,’ and they really kind of bonded in a kind of father son relationship.”

Stephen Dorff plays Mike Pucci, who makes a deal with Cindy the waitress that if he can get her to Earth, she will marry him. “Dorff is like a young Dennis Hopper,” Gordon said. “In the story his character starts out wanting to work for the big corporation, but by the end of the movie he is an independent trucker. He becomes a young John Canyon. There’s even a line in the movie John Canyon says, “I don’t want you to end up like me. ‘Stephen Dorff says, ‘Heaven forbid.’ At that point you know he will.

“Stephen Dorff is like Dennis in that he approaches things very realistically. If he can’t believe it, he can’t do it. He took what was a very sketchy character in the script and fleshed him out to make him real. He caught on to what we’re going for. “White trash in space’ is how he put it, trailer park guys who are in space.”

Cindy is played by Debi Mazar. Claimed Gordon, “I could actually say the part was written for her. Ted Mann and she worked together on a TV series called CIVIL WARS, where she played a secretary in a divorce attorney’s office. I used to watch the show and became a big fan of hers. When we were working on the first couple of drafts, the part was very bland and uninteresting, and Ted and I were talking about some ways to develop the character, and at one point, one of us mentioned why don’t we make it to Debi Mazar and from that point on, the part just took on a life of its own. She came in and read the part. There were no doubts that she should play that part.”

Gordon originally went with Ron Houser for the part of Captain Macanudo, who has been partially disintegrated and rebuilt, his inner workings visible through a transparent plastic shell. But the actor was replaced partway into shooting. Explains Gordon, “He is a wonderful actor, but it was one of those situations where his style of acting was at odds with what everyone else was doing. While everyone else was trying to ground their performances for the audience, Ron went in the opposite direction a bit.”

To replace him, Gordon went with Charles Dance, who had also been under consideration for the part. “Charles Dance was a happy accident, in a way,” Gordon recalls. “We were staying at the same hotel as he was, in London, and ran into him in the lobby one day and described the movie, and he said, ‘Let me look at the script. About a week later, I got a call from him that he wanted to play Captain Macanudo. I found out later that he had liked the script but wasn’t sure as this character was very different from anything that he had ever played before, and he showed it to his teenage daughter who said, ‘This is great, Dad. You should do this.’ That convinced him. No one has ever seen him play comedy before, and he’s wonderful. He had to undergo four to six hours of makeup every day to play the part, but again, he found a way to humanize a character who could have been just a cartoon, and there is this almost sexy quality about him as well, even though he’s half man and half machine. There is still a charisma that comes through all that makeup. By the end of it, you really like him. It’s funny, he saw the movie in Spain, and his wife said it was just terrible the character was not going to be around if there’s a sequel. I said, ‘Well, in this kind of movie, being blown up does not mean you won’t be around for the sequel.”

Also on hand is Barbara Crampton, who starred in Gordon’s first few features. “Barbara Crampton is an old friend,” he said. “We were trying to find an actress to play a very small but pivotal role, and we needed a sense that she and Debi Mazar were related to each other. Barbara is a wonderful mimic, and after spending a little time with Debi, she was able to get the accent down, so the two of them seemed like they were two peas from the same pod.”

With script, pre-production and cast apparently in place, Gordon went to Ireland to shoot—when disaster seemingly struck. “We went to Ireland because we were promised half the budget from our investors provided we shot there,” Gordon explained. “Then less than half a month before we started, it turned out the Irish producer who had promised us £7 million had only £2 million.”

Gordon credits his American producers, Peter Newman and Greg Johnson, for not abandoning the project. “I assumed that was it,” said the director, “but they went out and scrambled and found other producers and the movie never even had to shut down. The Irish government helped the film, which was made under Section 35, by which the Irish government would put up a portion of the film’s budget in exchange for filmmakers using Irish facilities and labor. But this was the first time that the government ever granted two Section 35s. For the first Section 35 we did not meet the terms, because the producer had not provided the correct amount of money. So the Irish government said, ‘We will allow you to post a second time for new investors to help you complete the film. ‘A new producer, Morgan Sullivan, came on board, one of the most renowned Irish producers, and he straightened out the mess and got us back on track, along with Peter Newman and Greg Johnson, and Guy Collins brought Goldcrest in with a lot of investors. Goldcrest would only come in if we did all the post-production work in London, so this is the first movie where I had to do the post-production as well as production away from home. What was originally to have been a three-month stint became over a year abroad.”

Regarding working in the U.K., Gordon reported, “I like Ireland very much, and the crew was sensational. This was not an easy movie to make. Every single shot had some level of difficulty—if it wasn’t zero gravity, it was creatures or prosthetics or pyro. It was never just simply two people sitting in a shot. The schedule was not that different from an ordinary film. We had an eleven-week period, which is still pretty tight for a normal movie, and our crew was very disciplined and quick and had wonderful attitudes. There never was any grumbling or complaining.”

Murton remembers it a little bit differently. “There were a lot of moments when we thought it wasn’t going to make it,” he said. “I had to send out letters for me and my crew saying, ‘If we don’t get paid, we’re leaving.’ That happened a couple of times, because sometimes we were three weeks in arrears, and they were trying desperately to bring money in. It certainly wasn’t a very smooth road, but we fought hard enough and it came through. My hat goes off to the American producers who kept it going, when we thought, “Well, that’s it.’ What they went through would send a lot of other people into the looney bin.”

Initially the production rejected Ireland’s Ardmore Studios because it did not have a stage large enough to encompass the scope of the production; however, it soon became apparent that Ardmore was the only true studio set-up in the country. Production designer Murton wanted a large stage for the Regalia interior. “I’m a great believer in using light to build a set,” he said. “If you can’t build it physically, we can use some good old theatrical tricks to make it work, and sometimes you need the space to throw light through stuff, and we didn’t have that (at Ardmore). We started looking in other areas. The only thing that was big enough was these old ex-meat storage places; unfortunately, they ended up being a very dangerous site because they have all this insulation that was highly flammable. Someone should have booked up Ardmore just in case, but we didn’t because we thought we were going somewhere else, so time was wasted.”

Gordon became concerned that if production did not begin on time, he might lose his cast. “Our start date would have to be pushed back about six months,” he recalled, “and our first reaction was, “We have commitments to people to start at a specific time,’ and so we explored other ways of making the film. One was converting a warehouse into a studio, and the space available was a huge meat carving facility with these gigantic refrigerators, which were about the size of a large sound stage. Unfortunately, the costs of converting it would have been the whole budget of the film; also, the time to get it ready would take up the six months that we’d be waiting anyway to get into Ardmore, so we decided to use the extra time to work and plan some more.”

Filming in Ireland proved a fairly copacetic experience. The shore of Dublin Bay ended up filling in for White Sands, New Mexico. The Dublin Civic Center, considered an eyesore by the inhabitants because its modern design clashes with the pastoral countryside, proved an ideal location for a hospital scene. The Irish and English crew members largely got along, but the resumption of hostilities during post-production created some nervousness on the part of the director.

As Gordon noted, “I was there when the truce was on, and it was really some of the best feeling between England and Ireland, and then right as we started post-production, the bombings started again. It was done outside of Ardmore in Ireland and also in London, and I was going back and forth between the two on a regular basis. There was a bombing about a block away from where the post-production house was in London, which was nerve-wracking. There were a lot of discussions because half the crew was Irish and the other half English, and they had all been able to work together as a team, and all of this broke out again, and there were a lot of discussions how to solve this problem. As an American, this seemed like something that should be settled fairly easily, and they would look at me like I was an idiot. It is very complicated and there doesn’t seem to be any easy answer.”

PRODUCTION DESIGN Once the story was in place, Gordon elaborately planned out how to visualize it unlike any previous space opera. То achieve this, he brought in a variety of artists like Ron Cobb, Berni Wrightson, Hajime Sorayama, and Bruce McCall.

Bringing these visions together and designing the overall movie is first-time production designer Simon Murton. “We deliberately did not want to use other films as references,” Gordon explained. “Instead of going with a sterile, white NASA feeling, we went the opposite, into bright colors and a commercialized feel. In 2001, they built the wonderful set that spins 360 degrees. In our film that became the diner which looks like a Bob’s Big Boy, so there’s the juxtaposition of science fiction and the familiar.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Another important element in the design of the film came from costume designer John Bloomfield. According to Gordon, they started by looking at the actual spacesuits. “We have a book called Space Gear; it went through the whole evolution of the space suit from a study point,” he said. “We also wanted the suit to look-rather than a real high-tech perfect suit like a beat-up, used suit that John Canyon got with his used truck. It’s like, when you change a tire: the gear you’ve got in your car is not pristine; it’s well used and some of the pieces are missing.” The result is a cross between a spacesuit and an old diving suit. “It’s really a kind of clumsy, bulky looking thing,” Gordon recalled, “and then he did a more modern, spiffed-up version for what the new models are like. They’re the slimmed-down, high-tech version.”

Bloomfield did a lot with plastic. “We moved away from natural materials and went for a lot of bright colors and corporate logos,” said Gordon. “The t entire costume is covered in logos, kind of taking this idea about how people wear logos on their clothes. Basically, the logo becomes the clothes. In this futuristic world, we are walking billboards.

“He’s a very witty designer,” Gordon continued. “A lot of the things he did were strange but familiar at the same time. You s see a lot of things like cowboy hats and baseball caps and 1 things that have been with us : for a long time and will probably be with us a few years from 1 now, so that you can look at these guys and recognize them immediately as truck drivers, 1 but they don’t look exactly like any truck drivers you’ve ever seen before.”

One of the key members of the SPACE TRUCKERS staff is Simon Murton, an experienced art director making his debut as production designer with this film. In addition to previously working with Gordon on FORTRESS, Murton has provided designs for such films as THE CROW, STARGATE, and JUDGE DREDD. His father is English production designer Peter Murton, but Simon forsook England to come to the U.S. because of the greater opportunities offered here.

“My basic premise for what we did is that human beings—especially Americans—don’t like change too much,” explained Murton. “For example, the [space station’s] diner, which was a plagiarism of 2001 the big circular set, but of course we couldn’t do that, so we built just over a third. It was kind of funny to have this circular set with everyone strapped in and the food stuck down. By the side of the set you would have stunt men walking down these rubber mats, almost horizontal and walking down to vertical positions. It was very weird to watch, but it was nice to actually recreate a Denny’s or a Bob’s Big Boy-only it’s in space—and use the same colors, the same kind of feeling for the whole thing. Let’s face it, truckers, if they are driving across America or driving through space, are still going to be the same type of people.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Murton likes to research his work, and so he and Gordon went to truck stops and examined books detailing spacecraft interiors and such. “I like to have a good reference around me because usually truth is stranger than fiction,” Murton claimed. “I always like to try and keep a certain logic in there, so the background is very believable. Everyone is getting sick and tired of things like in 2010, where everyone is inside of the Russian spaceship and every surface is covered with buttons. Let’s face it, even though it’s (visually) boring, there’s going to be a lot fewer buttons. One pushes oneself to make it look interesting and to make it look believable.”

That believability was abetted by pre-production “field trips,” according to Stuart Gordon, who added, “Simon likes to do a lot of research, so before we started working on the movie we went to a truck stop, to a guy who sold trucks, and we went to watch them unload container ships, what some people call ‘seafaring trucking’ and ‘offshore trucking.’ The containers that they bring are essentially truck trailers. What we discovered is that whole system, now accounting for 90% of all cargo, was invented by a trucking company.

“The idea is that the unit for transporting goods is the trailer of a truck. So we decided in our movie to do the same thing. We said that these trailers are not going to change; they are going to be the same in space as they are on earth, and instead of being pulled by ships, they’ll be pulled by rocket-powered trucks. Watching the loading and unloading of them, the different colors of the containers, the enormous cranes and so on-it really helped us get a sense of the size that we were dealing with. Simon started doing the drawings based on that research.”

Set 200 years into the future, when mankind is colonizing the other planets and moons of the solar system, the film presents space as a frontier, like the old American West, and it’s the truckers who bring in the much-needed supplies. Gordon felt that the controls should be kept low tech, because these are just working class joes doing their jobs. “The truck, for example, has all the controls of a truck,” said Gordon, “steering wheel and pedals on the floor for acceleration and breaking. We wanted an audience to look at this thing and say, ‘I could drive that, it’s not that far out.””

Gordon added, “One of the things we noticed about the way people deal with the future is that they want things to be recognizable and familiar, and to certain degrees, they will just make themselves feel more comfortable. Even though in space there is no up or down, we want one and we have to have one. You have to create those things just to maintain a sense of well being.”

In designing Canyon’s trucker’s cab, Murton explained, “I was trying to use the technology of the space shuttle and mix it in with what someone’s cabin was going to look like after three months in space, how it would be personalized and trashed. Would he wear clean socks, or would he wear socks at all? It was quite fun that way.

“There was also a problem in shooting it in that you have three actors and a film crew in this small, cramped kind of area. I seem to remember the d.p. complaining bitterly about it, but I didn’t feel like for one space trucker-making the starship Enterprise bridge.”

The space trucks in the film are rocket rigs that haul enormous loads throughout the solar system. “Apart from 2001, nobody has really shown the solar system. Everyone has conveniently gone out a bit further. I would like to see more space movies that actually take place within the solar system,” said Murton. “Originally, it was going to be traveling across space, but we all thought, ‘Let’s face it: even 300 years in the future, that was going to be ridiculous.’ Stuart wanted it to be 300 years in the future, and we brought it back to 150 years in the future.

“We took inspiration from the big, long freight trains out here,” Murton continued. “I went for the three-tiered container in the Y. shaped configuration, because it made the interiors and the exteriors kind of interesting—we could do a trick where we turn the camera on its side and the actor looks like he’s walking on one of the sides. It was a bit of a bother to work out the continuity sometimes. You can design all these elements, but the character’s got to go from A to B to C, and whatever way they cut it, it has to be in a kind of logical progression.”

Gordon also wanted to explore the idea of the future of private enterprise in space. “A company is not going to spend that kind of money on exploration and settling space without putting a corporate logo on everything they touch,” Gordon declared. “Rather than the silver and white sterile worlds you see in so many science fiction movies, you get just the opposite. We’ve made it colorful and tacky.

“Another thing we learned,” Gordon continued, “is that people get starved for color in space, because you look out your window and all you see is black. One of the things we talked about is when they had the Skylab, the astronauts got so starved for color that they began watching the color bars on the TV screen. We decided to go with some really bright colors and that commercialization that they would be selling stuff so when you’re flying into the space station, this is what you’ll see, a clutter. Not a well-designed space station, but a modular mess where stuff has just been added on and stuck on.

“I also think it’s the way it would be in space, with everything modular. You would constantly send things up which would be added on, so it’s not like it’s just been designed by some master architect. It probably starts out as a much smaller thing they did. This is the first section that was there, and then all the rest of the stuff was added on to it and just stuck together and built onto it.

“It’s funny, because we had some great designers on this movie, and I would have to say to them it should be badly designed, like the Mount Lakemore projects—a mixture of styles, and there are different places in the movie that you go to that each has its own style to it.”

Bernie Wrightson Conceptual Art

Former advertising and National Lampoon artist Bruce McCall designed most of the film’s satirical billboards and advertisements. According to Murton, “We ended up really using Bruce for the signage and advertising and stuff, because he used to be a very big advertising art director. He came up with some really funny stuff. ‘Laxigo-Go, go, go with Laxigo.’ It’s nice having someone come in and just do that kind of stuff. He also came up with the Captain Macanudo look. Bruce throws these wonderful, crazy ideas together; he’s fun for that kind of look. It’s like driving along the highway with billboards, but we wanted to do it in space. Stuff like that made it work quite well. I would like to have seen more of it.”

“The thing about creating a movie like this is that you are really creating a whole world,” explained Gordon. “You get down to all the little details of that world. Some of the details I don’t think really make it into the film because they are so small, unless you do a macro-closeup of a label on a packet of cigarettes. They put a sign that said, *These cigarettes will kill you. What do we have to say here?’ Or there is a sign in the hospital that says, ‘If you can pay, we can care.’ Little details like that.” For example, on the thousand dollar bills, the designers added a sticker good for a burger and fries at McDonald’s. The money is also labeled, “The United States of America, a Subsidiary of Tokyo Bank.”

Bernie Wrightson Conceptual Art

One of Murton’s important design challenges was designing the interior and exterior of the space pirate ship, the Regalia, which was rendered in CGI by Electric Image. “I wanted to make this huge radical space liner that ends up looking like a massive U-boat. I felt very strong about doing it like a very retro, old rusty ocean liner type of thing. We know that things don’t rust in space, but at that point I didn’t care, I just thought it was a very good looking design,” said Murton. “It was a really difficult design to do, because of what Ted Mann had written or what Stuart had come up with. This is the problem with a lot of shows: the director wants a parameter; it is written as another parameter; and confines of the budget or time are another parameter; and you have to try to punch them together and see what you come out with. Like Stuart always wanted this rotating gravity type of thing; plus we needed to get the space truck into the Regalia, and the truck is two miles long with all-its containers, so it’s like ‘How the hell are we going to come up with something that’s going to work out and visually look good?’ Eventually we came up with an Eiffel Tower on its sidethat kind of rationalization.”

Still, Murton has found designing SPACE TRUCKERS to be both a unique, enjoyable experience. “I had a lot of fun with the movie,” he said. “I could do different things. It didn’t have to be the normal sci-fi look; I think everyone is getting sick and tired of hardware—it’s been done to death. 2001 and ALIEN still did it better than most people. This is why films like CITY OF THE LOST CHILDREN are so refreshing. That’s a bit industrial, but it had a certain style and look which was very cool. Unfortunately the story failed a bit, but the visuals and the action was pretty wild. I don’t know if SPACE TRUCKERS does look like any other sci-fi movie, but it’s pretty wacky. The story itself, about a space trucker hauling strange cargo, gave us the inspiration of doing normality here, but throwing curves and just doing some wacky stuff.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Hajime Sorayama, famed as the designer of sexy robots, was having his first show in Los Angeles at the Tamara Bane Gallery in the spring of 1994 that director Stuart Gordon contacted him on opening day and asked him to design SPACE TRUCKERS’ biomechanical robot warriors. One of the key images in the film is the moment when Captain Macanudo and his companions encounter the as yet unfully formed menacing being for the first time: the embryonic warriors-created by Dr. Nabel to be phenomenally lethal, capable of wiping out legions of highly trained and well-equipped space marines adorn the sides of the cargo hold like obscene crosses, from which mechanical tentacles sprout and upraised thighs quickly become legs.

When asked what inspired his conception of the bio-engineered warriors, Sorayama responded, “I imagined nautiluses. They have about 90 tentacle-like feelers and with these feelers they catch their food. When you think about that, isn’t it amazing? I explained to Mr. Gordon how I came up with the idea when I drew the design of the Bio-Mechanical Warrior: In the past three to four years, I became very interested in the forms of plants’ roots, branches, organs of insects, tentacles of sea anemone, and their similarity to blood vessels such as arteries or veins. If they have their own wills and energy and move on their own, how amazing it must be! When I was drawing this, I was imagining armory which is a combination of the organic body of plants or insects and high-tech metals and plastics. These tentacles work like radar or sensors. If there is some sound in the direction of four o’clock, one tentacle moves in that direction.”

In creating his design, Sorayama had to keep in mind the rapid, fluid movements that were expected of the BMWs. Indeed, by using female dancers in the roles, the film does manage to create menaces which are both graceful and lightning quick in their lethalness. Still, what is drawn on a page cannot always be reproduced on a soundstage, particularly if it has to be inhabited by human beings. “The image can’t always be reproduced in 3-D,” Sorayama explained. “One hundred percent of the realization of my idea is almost impossible, so we have to find a way to compromise in the best way. The process of realization of the design came as a result of continual compromises during its creation.”

Makeup surrealist and artist Screaming Mad George was given the difficult assignment of bringing Sorayama’s concepts to life. Sorayama commented on George’s efforts, saying, “Screaming Mad George felt from the beginning that building a perfect realization of my design was just physically impossible, so he put great effort to make me realize this.

The reality is you have to learn to compromise, because it is almost impossible to reproduce two-dimensional designs into three dimensions exactly how we wish. I think Screaming Mad George did an excellent job, and I really appreciate his proper advice to me during the course of this project. I really would like to work with him again.”

Sorayama has long held an interest in making films and relishes the challenge of working on future film projects. “It makes me very excited and gives me ecstacy to have all those other people’s help in making my fantasy come true,” he noted. Originally, he intended to have a more hands-on approach to the production of the BMWs, but he realized that it would be better to leave make up effects to specialists who know that field while restricting his labors to what he does best: design.

Overall, in assessing his experience on the film, the artist noted, “There are many things I experienced for the first time. The whole experience was very new and fresh to me. Although I enjoyed the process of making it very much, I realized that the reality of it was a lot of physical labor, a lot of sweat.”

Regarding the film itself, Sorayama noted, “I saw the premiere of the movie SPACE TRUCKERS in Tokyo in September. I enjoyed it very much and I am pleased so much. There are many details that made me enjoy it. Mr. Gordon’s own world of retrospective reality in sci-fi movie-making is so unique.”

PHYSICAL EFFECTS A key member of the SPACE TRUCKERS production team was Paul Gentry, an experienced effects man with films such as MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL, ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE LAST ACTION HERO to his credit. He had worked with David Allen on DOLLS and ROBOT JOX, and also worked previously with Gordon on FORTRESS. I introduced him to certain things which he didn’t know the camera could do, just little tricks of the trade, such as the use of lightning strikes, which is a very basic tool of the industry, but it’s interesting to use it in a battle scene. Traditionally, lighting strikes are used to create lightning effects. Of course, you can change the color of it, which makes it more the color of a gunflash, so you can have several lighting strikes going off in the background, and then you have soldiers firing in the foreground, and it makes it appear much bigger than it is because you have flashing all over the place. It creates a lot of excitement, and it’s something Stuart hadn’t used before, and on top of that you throw in white frames in editorial.”

One of the biggest problems faced by the special effects crew in SPACE TRUCKERS was zero gravity, which, Gordon notes, “is something you don’t see in too many space movies any more. It’s expensive and very time consuming, but we felt that it was important enough to spend the time to do it. Unlike Ron Howard, we couldn’t afford to send people up in the Vomit Comet and get real zero gravity, so we had to find another way to do it. Some of the solutions were very simple. Sometimes we used string; other times we would turn things upside down. The best solution sometimes was to have the actors play weightlessness, and we were able to convincingly portray weightlessness just by the way they moved their bodies.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

To assist with the weightless wire work, Gordon hired a stunt coordinator from A CHINESE GHOST STORY and POWER RANGERS, Koichi Sakamoto, who had done work in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, and who spoke English. Many of the stuntmen on the project were Asian martial artists and acrobats. “We had a perfect stunt team: Apple Stunts it’s called,” said Gordon. “They did some amazing things. We had a sequence where a guy takes a punch and flips end over end for 30 feet into a wall. This was all done right there live on the set. As a matter of fact, in terms of the zero gravity, there was very little in the way of optical effects.”

Recalled Gentry, “Koichi and I did these augmented scenes of this whole battle going on. We had limited time, only four days, and we all realized we needed two weeks for this elaborate sequence because it’s so difficult setting up these stunt shots. One guy (Tatsuro Koike), absolutely the most fearless stunt guy I’ve seen, was slamming into this or that. He looked like he’d just broken his neck. You’d yell, ‘Cut! Tatsuro, are you all right? You’d think he’s dead, and he’d just look up and smile. “That OK?’

“It’s going to be hard to watch SPACE TRUCKERS and not see the same faces scene after scene, doing any stunts that are going on. Tatsuro we had in any costume imaginable-it was funny. You do things safely, and with a certain amount of care, it takes time. These things can’t be rushed; it’s counterproductive. We barely got through them by the skin of our teeth.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Since there was not a lot of money left over for wire removal, most of the wire work had to be hidden by the cinematographer while on set. “I think it’s a testament to Mac Ahlberg, our cinematographer, who’s an expert at this,” said Gordon. “Part of the solution was built into the set design. Simon Murton was aware we’d have to hide wires, so he designed the set to have all kinds of strips on it. It fakes your eye out, allows the background to camouflage the wires.”

“I wanted the lines in the set going the other way to make the sets look wider,” said Murton, “but they had the problem that they weren’t going to have enough money to do wire removal. Stuart wanted to do realistic space freefall, and in reality, we should have had the set on a gimbel, but we never had the money nor the time to do it properly, so we came up with something like the space shuttle where they have these velcro pads absolutely everywhere so they can stick things like cameras or paraphernalia to the walls to keep them from floating around and bumping into things. We just did all these vertical lines to help camouflage the cables. I’d say 70% of the time it works. The other 30% it didn’t. Sometimes you see it; sometimes you don’t.”

Gordon employed simple misdirection to prevent viewers from spotting the wires. “When you’re looking at somebody floating, the audience always looks above him for the wires,” the director explained, “but if you shoot it upside down, tilting the camera in some strange way, the wires are below, where you’re not expecting to see them. There are a couple of shots in the movie where the wires are clearly visible—they are not hidden at all—but nobody has ever spotted them because they are looking in the wrong place. There are places where we did have to do some wire removal, but I think the total number of wire removal shots in the whole movie was something like three, thanks to Mac and Simon’s ingenuity, which saved us a fortune.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

MAKEUP EFFECTS On SPACE TRUCKERS John Vulich was brought in at the production design phase of the project. “At that point I was talking to them about doing all of the effects on the film,” he recalled. “We broke it down into three really major categories. There were dummies, all the dead bodies of the characters killed by these creatures, body effects; there were the creatures; and there was Macanudo, who was the main bad guy.”

It was decided to break up the makeup effects chores. Greg Cannom, who won the Academy Award for BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and MRS. DOUBTFIRE, was selected to head the Macanudo design team, with his associate Scott Oshita taking care of all the on-site chores. Screaming Mad George wound up executing the Bio-Mechanical Warriors designed by Hajime Sorayama.

All other makeup effects for the film were handled by Vulich’s Optic Nerve, with the on-site chores executed by technical makeup supervisor Mike Measimer, assisted by John Snyder. “Stuart knew we did the best gore in the business, so we ended up doing a lot of the gore-type stuff,” said Vulich. “He wanted something that had never been done before, and he also wanted to get away with a lesser rating. He wanted the visceral impact of serious gore, but he wanted it to be almost pretty in a way. So we had to figure out a way to make that work.”

One bizarre effect created by Vulich was the genetically engineered, box-like, stackable swine that John Canyon transports for UniPork. “That was always Stuart’s joke,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they were like pig boxes, so you could stack and maximize their storage space, which I thought was a brilliant idea.

“We made these pigs kind of square, going back and forth design-wise. Simon Murton came up with his version of it, and then we sculpted it and sent Stuart off some Polaroids. He wanted everything to be squared, the nose, the eyes; he just wanted everything to echo the square shape, and since it was a cartoon film, I think they work fine. We tried to make the pigs as realistic as possible in texture and detail and paint job, with wrinkles and all that, but ultimately, they are square, and it’s a little bit of a cartoony concept and there’s only so far that you can go with it. There’s a little bit of that aspect, but I think in the context of that film, every project has its own requirements, and on this one, anything goes. It’s OK for them to be that way.”

Originally, Optic Nerve planned to manufacture some 40 or 50 of the cubist porcine creatures, but in the interests of economy eventually settled for between 25 or 30 exteriors with four mechanically operated boars for closeups.

“One of them was a fully mechanized puppet with a lot of different lip snarls, tongue wiggling, nose, eye blinks, ears and all that,” explains Vulich. “Then there were two that maybe just had eye blinks and maybe another one that just had ear wiggles. There were different ranges of organization. The way it was storyboarded, you really only see one where I think he’s supposed to be feeding it a hot dog, which is another Gordon joke. We had one that had to be really intricate to hold up for that.”

Another makeup handled by Optic Nerve was the scene in which Keller gets sucked out a hole that gets blown in a window. “We had to do a head cast of George Wendt, and he actually wasn’t available at the time, so we had one of the guys sculpt this agonized face going through the hole,” said Vulich. “That was one of those real quick cuts, so it was a simple puppet that didn’t require any mechanization or anything like that. It was one of those puppets that is really ideal because its eyes are closed, it’s making an expression, and there’s already some dynamics there. One of the hardest things to do in our business is doing a mechanical puppet of a living person. It is very rare, it’s ever been done right, and it’s phenomenally expensive. There is just something about the character of the eyes that is really hard to replicate, so it was one of those things where it was a good situation for us. You had a great expression, the eyes are closed, there are just some quick cuts of him slamming through there, so we designed this beanbag-like dummy of him, with a really rough armature and this material that collapsed in on itself and pulled through there.

“We planned on doing it two different ways,” Vulich continued. “We wanted to start off with him and actually cut the set away, to make it look like he went through a small hole. Actually the hole is cut bigger than it is, but his clothing is hiding that. There’s a beat where he’s trapped in agony like that, and there’s a second beat and he gets sucked all the way through it, and at that point, it’s our dummy being pulled through it. It was just a matter of playing with the right materials we could get to collapse right and design the understructure of the clothing that would just pull through with this collapsible armature. It was a little scissor-like thing.”

Vulich has become a great believer in working with silicon rather than latex to achieve a more lifelike look. “We did the head in a silicon-type material because it has a more life-like texture, and punched in the hair, did a lot of detail,” he said. “As usual, we end up putting two or three months of work into something you see for seven frames, but whether it’s seven frames or seven hundred, it has to hold up for that moment; otherwise, it’s useless. There are only so many shortcuts that you can take. In this case, the shortcut was we didn’t have to worry too much mechanically about what was going on, those expressions, but cosmetically it had to look like him.”

Silicon is a much more lifelike material for makeup effects, but there are still problems in terms of finding appropriate adhesives that will adhere to skin and silicon. “I think it’s got to be the next step in technology-makeup to get out of using foam latex, which is a wonderful material but also has a lot of limitations,” said Vulich. “Silicon, however, is more expensive, definitely, but you also find a lot less of a reject rate. The cost of material in any project is nowhere near as extensive as the cost of the labor involved. For what you’re getting out of it, I certainly think it’s worthwhile. You paint them with silicon and silicon chalking, like what you use to seal an aquarium. You thin that out and mix colors into it. It’s better than something like vinyl—they are really comparable lookwise, but vinyl when you paint it sometimes tends to bleed through after a few months.”

Nevertheless, vinyl proved to be exactly the right material for one of the film’s more startling effects. “The dowager, the woman in the bathroom that’s a robot, that’s the other effect we did that’s similar to the George Wendt thing,” said Vulich. “That head we did in vinyl, because we needed it to stretch 300-400%, so we pushed the envelope as far as plasticizing it as far as we could plasticize it before it just wouldn’t work anymore. For that, silicon would have been a little trickier. Silicon is more durable in a denser state, it’s actually better lasting than vinyl, but vinyl is more flexible. You can’t plasticize the silicon because it tears a little easier.

“This woman had a wonderful face, just really great,” Vulich continued. “We sculpted it with the eyes open, took a lot of great care to try and capture the character and all that. She already had a nice big mouth to begin with. We also came up with a keypad. The keypad actually worked—you could hit a button and things would go off. Stuart even wanted to make a sound on set-he knew he’d replace the sound later-just something to lend a reality. We put a little beeper in it, a little Radio Shack kind of thing. We played around with different modes of plasticity. and I was amazed at how wide you could do this before it would rip apart. It seemed to work pretty well.”

Optic Nerve was also assigned the task of depicting the victims of the Bio-Mechanical Warriors. “Stuart wanted something visceral but not gory,” recalled Vulich. “He wanted to go for—not necessarily a family picture, but something a little bit more wider in appeal. He knew he had to come up with something not bloody but almost pretty in a way. Somewhere, I came up with the idea of opalescent colors. I just theorized off the top of my head: let’s say it hit your atoms; it does something so different to your atoms that it disembodies them and all of a sudden you see these opalescent colors, almost like what happens when you burnish metal and it has a blue opalescence, like tempered steel-almost like the reaction steel would have, but on your flesh, just something totally different happens, so you don’t see blood pouring out, you see all these kind of golds and greens and all these weird colors.

“We did all these tests,” continued Vulich, “and it sounds like a ludicrous idea, but it actually looked interesting, like something weird and molecular was going on, and Stuart seemed really pleased with that. It was just a matter of working with metallic powders and opalescent powders, all these different kinds of almost garish colors, and then we also experimented a lot with mixing these powders with things like Alka Seltzer and different foams and stuff like that to get it to foam up almost like it was disintegrating. They also did some tests with computer graphics to mix in this look like everything is breaking up into balls, something similar to LAWNMOWER MAN, that whatever cell structures that make up the body break up and keep getting smaller and smaller into this dust or foam. So instead of shredded meat and tissue, it was more like balls of green and metallic things, like we’re disintegrating these things. I think with the tone being a little bit more comic, these ideas work fine with it. It’s hard to say if it would work in a different context or not. It was just another example of trying to do something different than what’s been done before, which is really typical of Stuart’s work.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

VISUAL EFFECTS British CGI company Electric Image, building on its 13-year reputation for commercial advertising and broadcast work, takes a leap into the feature arena with SPACE TRUCKERS. The assignment came about because the company’s digital effects supervisor Paul Docherty had a working relationship with the film’s special effects supervisor Brian Johnson. Docherty said, “When Brian landed the assignment, there came the opportunity for us to quote on it. We looked at it from every angle and realized it was unique in that it involved a certain amount of original 3-D work plus a lot of composites like blue-/green-screen effects, lasers, people being blasted, morphed and melted. Our proposal also included a communications system between ourselves and Ireland. So we were able to answer problems in terms of the kind of work we’d done before but also with the right kind of communication between all factions.”

Originally, director Stuart Gordon wanted as many of the effects done in-camera as possible. But, Docherty noted, “The reasons for moving into the digital area are because the advanced technology can solve a lot more problems than ever before. The level of detail and believability is much greater as the software improves on a month-by month basis. The argument that digitals have a cartoon look is receding as the technology inexorably moves towards a greater realism. Now you can allow an image to spend a longer time on screen without sophisticated audiences ‘spotting the wires’ so to speak. Most directors, especially those with no special effects knowledge, are turning towards digitals because it’s fast becoming the best way to help them tell their story.”

Electric Image’s main task was to build the pirate spaceship, Regalia. “The Regalia lurks in this scummy sea of asteroids waiting to prey on anything that comes near it, like the pirates of old,” explained Docherty. “The Regalia crew-led by the bionic Captain Macanudo take over another craft, dismantle it, and reform it into something else. The visual reference point for us was the James Bond movie where the front of a boat opens to scoop up its prey. Halfway through, the story, trucker John Canyon and his pachyderm rig are captured by the Regalia because they are escaping from the TransGen company with an unusual cargo connected to Macanudo.”

Simon Haddocks, head of animation at Electric Image, came up with the design of the Regalia: “Basically, what I did was raid all the fantasy film magazines in specialist shops—your own included-took out those old STAR WARS books and made a whole portfolio of designs, ‘Let’s take a bit of this, a bit of that I like this detail’-and that’s how we got there. It’s Captain Nemo’s Nautilus with an even more Gothic feel.

“Scale was a bit of a worry,” Haddocks continued. “The Regalia had to look like a huge spaceship-one of those colossal mile-long numbers that soars over the audience’s heads. That meant we had to have smaller windows. You do tend to sit at your workstation for weeks on end adding detail and embellishing on textures. It had to look less computer. The good thing about the ship is it really does look better on film-it’s slightly more contrast in that medium. I like the fact that it looks like a vast bit of Victorian ironwork. That was an accident because of the old pirate feel we went for. For example, we’ve given the windows a yellowish glow rather than a white one to suggest the possibility of oil lamps lighting the interiors. There’s also this big skull design on the side, should anyone be in any doubt as to what craft it is. It’s also docked in a belt of dark shiny asteroids. That, more than anything else, made us decide to go the digital route as black shiny asteroids are impossible to build as models whereas computers can do it relatively easily.”

If any one image influenced the design of the Regalia the most, it was the Nostromo ship in ALIEN, admitted Haddocks. He said, “It’s hard to imagine building something like that on the computer because there is just so much detail on that model. To be perfectly honest, there is only just enough detail on the Regalia. There’s only one machine at Electric Image that can render the whole spaceship at once—and we need 400 megabytes of on-line RAM just to do that. To render close-ups of it takes 30 minutes a frame. If you take models from past space epics, it’s the stuff with all the barnacles that’s most fun. But we can’t simply stick more model kit pieces on the side. Modelmakers can add detail without penalty; the computer animator can’t. We always have to think in terms of how hard it is to render, but machines do double their speed every 18 months or so. A year ago we couldn’t have done this job. In a year’s time we could have done it far faster.”

In all, Electric Image’s 15 strong team had 100 different shots to accomplish. Because of this workload, Electric Image upgraded its Onyx multiprocessor super computer and brought in Descreet Logic ‘Inferno’ to add to the existing complement of high-end Silicon Graphics work stations running Wavefront ‘Explore’ software. Docherty said, “We decided to upgrade to ‘Inferno’ because of the higher resolutions and quality levels a feature film requires and because it is the best at providing us with a high-level multi-layer compositing system that not only runs in real time but also operates at resolutions for just about any large screen format.”

CONCLUSION Principal shooting finished in October, 1995, with seven months allotted to complete the special effects. To make things easier, the film was extensively storyboarded. Docherty said, “That way things could be prepared and started whilst the live action shoot was going on. We had enough skilled people to pre-plan every shot-so much so, in fact, we’ve had hardly any contact with Stuart Gordon we’ve dealt solely with Brian Johnson and the other special effects supervisor, Paul Gentry. The problem with working on most feature films is that decisions are left to the last minute. We evened that process out greatly because we were so well prepared.”

Both Docherty and Haddocks were watchful about not getting carried away by the latest technology. Haddocks remarked, “We are all still fascinated by the digital technology to a large degree, and the danger is to overdo it. As long as the Regalia looks authentic, though, I’ll be happy. We met the guys in the Dublin model shop recently, and they said how relieved they were about not building the spaceship because of the mechanics involved. There’s a revolving centrifuge in the ship which would be a nightmare to create as a mechanical model, whereas it’s a relatively simple process for us.”

Docherty continued, “The basic difference between computer work and miniature work is that we can build a model layer by layer to a very high degree of detail which can be seen pretty well at any angle necessary with complete control over lighting and texture. Traditionally, the miniature shop would have to build a series of different models for each shot, rig them separately, and then shoot them. What we’ve learned on our side is that in producing the Regalia as a computer model it’s very close to what it would take if you were doing it as a miniature, but the shooting is obviously easier than motion control. I feel we’ve used digital technology appropriately in SPACE TRUCKERS. It’s taking its place in the special effects canon as another tool to be used in completing the whole. And you still have to have artists at the work stations to give the technology the imaginative edge it needs.” Alan Jones

youtube

CAST/CREW Directed Stuart Gordon

Writing Credits Ted Mann Stuart Gordon

Music Colin Towns

Dennis Hopper as John Canyon Debi Mazar as Cindy Stephen Dorff as Mike Pucci Barbara Crampton as Carol Charles Dance as Nabel/Macanudo George Wendt as Keller Seamus Flavin as Chopper 4 Jason O’Mara as Chopper 3 Vernon Wells as Mr. Cutt Sandra Dickinson as Bitchin’ Betty

Makeup Department Mark Alfrey … special makeup effects artist Rosie Blackmore … chief makeup Deborah Boylan … makeup trainee Greg Cannom … designer and creator: Macanudo Liz Dean … special makeup effects assistant: Optic Nerve Rob Hinderstein … special makeup effects artist Mike Measimer … special effects makeup supervisor: Optic Nerve Tina Phelan … makeup trainee (as Christina Phelan) Dave Snyder … special makeup effects technical supervisor: Optic Nerve

Art Department Ron Cobb … conceptual artist Bernie Wrightson … conceptual artist Bruce McCall … conceptual art Yasushi Nirasawa … conceptual artist Hajime Sorayama… conceptual artist Tamara Conboy … graphic designer

Special Effects by Chiharu Akimoto … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. Linda Benavente-Notaro … lab technician: Cannom Creations (as Linda Benevente-Notaro) Roland Blancaflor … lab technician: Cannom Creations Evan Brainard … mechanical design: Optic Nerve Maria Bruce … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. Brendan Byrne … physical effects technician: second unit Kevin Byrne … physical effects technician: second unit Neil Carr … special effects rigger Ron Cartwright … senior special effects technician James Conrad … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. John Crawford … mechanics: S.M.G. Inc. Jeff L. Deist … lab technician: Cannom Creations (as Jeff Deist) Eric Fox … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. André Freitas … lab technician: Cannom Creations (as Andre Freitas) Misa Uo Gardner … coordinator: S.M.G. Inc. (as Misa U. Gardner) Paul Gentry … special effects supervisor Screaming Mad George … special effects designer: Bio-Mechanical Warriors, S.M.G. Inc. (as Screaming Mad George [Joji Tani]) Asao Goto … key effects: S.M.G. Inc. Mimi Hagi … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. Angela Hajianis … lab technician: Cannom Creations Shinobu Hamada … lab technician: S.M.G. Inc. Rufus Hearn … construction: Optic Nerve Chris Heeter … construction: Optic Nerve David Hoehn … special effects prosthetics: Cannom Creations Stephen Hutchinson … senior special effects technician (as Steve Hutchinson) Bill Jacob … lab technician: Cannom Creations Brian Johnson … special effects supervisor Gerry Johnston … physical effects supervisor: second unit (as Gerry Johnson) J.P. Keating … assistant: Optic Nerve Louis Kiss … production assistant: Cannom Creations Taishiro Kiya … key effects: S.M.G. Inc. Phil Knowles … practical senior effects technician (as Philip Knowles)

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Starlog#241 Cinefantastique v27n11-12 Cinefantastique v28n08 Femme Fatales v07n06

Space Truckers (1996) Retrospective SUMMARY At a corporation's base on the Neptunian moon Triton, mercenaries are setting up a defense perimeter to try to hold off an unstoppable cyborg warrior.

#90sMovies

0 notes

renaroo · 7 years

Text

Wednesday Roundup 15/6/2017

So this is a day late but in my defense I had a ridiculous amount of comics to get through with no one to blame but myself here. And you know what? I genuinely enjoyed almost everything. But does that mean every comic was good this week? And even so what did I think was the best?

Honestly I don’t know how to write these intros for people who wouldn’t be here to read my opinion anyway so let’s just jump into it.

Marvel’s All-New Wolverine, Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, DC’s Detective Comics, DC’s Gotham Academy: Second Semester, DC’s Justice League of America, Image’s Motor Crush, DC’s Superwoman, IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, DC’s Titans, IDW’s Transformers: Salvation, DC’s Wonder Woman

Marvel’s All-New Wolverine (2015-present) #21 Tom Taylor, Leonard Kirk, Cory Hamscher, Terry Pallot, Michael Garland

Okay I need this issue to reread a million times over because there are just so many things I love all at once. Like, oh my gosh. I was almost in tears multiple times because relationships! Healing! Supporting each other!

Wade and Gabby alone could just about make this issue perfect, but then you have Laura and Daken hugging and worried about each other, and Old Man Logan being likable for the first time in any of my readings of him. There’s so much I enjoy, though I find the cover rather deceiving. This is much more of a Howlett family reunion than anything else, though I did enjoy Riri’s parts in it.

I just eriously adore these characters and it meant a lot to see them all come together like they have here and that cliffhanger HURT so much more for it.

I will nitpick the art a bit because we’ve been doing so good about keeping Laura in the Wolverine costume which is much preferred to her X-23 wardrobes, for sure, but this issue it pretty much looked exactly like one of her old costumes without the midriffs and it was kinda weird. I know she took off a lot of her armor for skin contact but it’s... idk. It was weird.

The main thing I’m happy about though is that as we go on, I realize that literally all of the Marvel books I’ve kept are going out of their way to not involve themselves in Secret Wars and it’s kind of beautiful. Laura and Gabby are stuck on an island that’s quarantined (and I can pretend Wade’s there with them instead of whatever’s going on since I dropped Deadpool for the summer crossovers, thanks Tom Taylor!), Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are literally off world, and the rest are non-616. So yay me!

Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows (2016-present) #8 Gerry Conway, Ryan Stegman, Jesus Aburtov

For those who don’t know, Mary Jane Watson is genuinely one of my favorite Marvel characters and is easily one of the reasons I ever stuck with the Spider-Man comics for as long as I did was because of my interest in her and wanting to see her and Peter.

I can also thank her for my genuine attraction to redheads probably.

But one of the main reasons that I’ve loved this book so much is because, as written by Gerry Conway, this is the Peter and MJ of my dreams. I love them so much, and the complications that comes from their relationship and from growing older, raising a daughter, and MJ’s desire to continuously be the glue to keep both Peter and Annie together logically causes her to seek out a way to continue being Spinerette without syphoning off Peter’s powers.

It’s almost like growing old, having a stable relationship, trying to keep things fresh while raising a kid, are all dramatic and worthy of good storytelling in their own right or something HMM.

Anyway, yes it’s completely on the nose where this is going and it’s a little curious how MJ’s not immediately aware of the connection between what’s going on with her right now and the horrible, arguably traumatizing experience she and Peter had, but who knows what’s canon anymore lol

Basically, I sideye a bit from a story point of view, but this series continues to make up for it with the real thing that matters to me: these characters and their development.

DC’s Detective Comics (2016-present) #958 James Tynion IV, Aluaro Martinez, Raul Fernandez, Brad Anderson

Honestly I really love the slower issues where Tynion takes more time to make moments for the relationships between the characters and give us interractions we didn’t know we wanted -- Kate going with Luke and Jean Paul to a basketball game, Cass and Clayface being adorable by reciting a play, Bruce at a poker game with a bunch of assholes in homage to Almost Got ‘im!? It was a lot of fun honestly.

...

Okay I take issue with Cass’ dialogue. I know she was repeating lines from a tape and such but it’s weird to see her make so much progress when just two issues ago she was almost monosyllabic. Like... I want to see Cass gradually learning, I want to feel her frustration with hitting walls, I want to see her struggle and achieve despite the struggle because that gradual progression was honestly something we weren’t delivered in the former canon. We have a great opportunity for it here.

But y’know. I’m particular with Cass and it’s hard to say where her baseline for reading and speech even is in this canon because her dyslexia may be in tact but her circumstances growing up are completely different. So I don’t know.

Now. I’m a sucker for Bruce and Zatanna team-ups because I’m a schmuck but I’m really excited for next issue. Had a lot of fun with this one. This feels like a decent pace for Tynion -- at least in my opinion.

DC’s Gotham Academy: Second Semester (2016-2017) #10 Brenden Fletcher, Becky Cloonan, Karl Kerschl, Adam Archer, Massyk, Sandra Hope

This comic is speeding toward an end and I’m not sure if I’m ready!

From the beginning, for me at least, the selling point for Gotham Academy has been just how much these kids felt like real teenagers and real friends with all their various relationships and connections, platonic or romantic or something in between. And it’s powerful to see that coming to play as an advantage to completing Olive’s arc, but also as a disadvantage since the consequences of many of her actions hurt that much more.

I’ll save a lot of my thoughts for a complete wrap up of the series but overall, very happy and very grateful for the continuously good read that is GA

DC’s Justice League of America (2016-present) Volume 1: Road to Rebirth Steve Orlando, Jody Houser, Ivan Reis, Andy MacDonald, Stephen Byrne, Jamal Campbell, Mirk Andolfo

WE GOTTA GET THE BAND BACK TOGETHER. WE’RE ON A MISSION FROM GAD.

In all seriousness, I’m a huge fan of Vixen and Ryan Choi as well as a big fan of Justice League International, as it was in its 80s glory. So my interests with this particular lineup were piqued from the beginning and I made myself wait for the first volume to dive in.

For the most part, this is a team gathering exercise. Characters that have lacked the spotlight in the last few years -- Vixen, Ray, Killer Frost, and the Atom -- were given whole issues to reintroduce them to this continuity. And honestly those issues were great. I really, really love the updated origins for them and feel that they’re a good blend of honoring the past of the characters as well as adapting them for a new world.

Lobo, Batman, and Black Canary took back seat, but considering that there were already tensions showing within the group, I think it’s safe to assume that giving the spotlight to the rest of the team won’t always last this long. Things are nothing if not explosive among these members.

I really did mean it when I said this is a team gathering exercise, because there’s no first case to unite everyone. There’s not any real antagonists or team-ups we see to speakof. It was just getting hte jLA together.

And for me it’s enough to get me intrigued, though I’d completely understand if people told me it was far from enough for them.

Now they just need to add Big Barda, Booster Gold, and Ted Kord and I’ll be satisfied.

Image’s Motor Crush (2016-present) Vol. 1 Brenden Fletcher, Cameron Stewart, Babs Tarr

I was not the biggest fan of this team’s Batgirl team though I appreciated the aesthetics and what not. There just never seemed to be a storyline that really interested me and I couldn’t be sold on the characterization for Barbara. So I kept hearing about Motor Crush for the last year and was really itnerested in it so I wanted until this volume came out and.

Well, quite simply, I’m in love.

Tell you what, those biker gangs that kept coming up really confusingly out of place in Batgirl make a hell of a lot more sense now that I can see this team’s actual passion project.

So I love Motor Crush a lot, I’m really invested in Domino, the mystery that is her origins and the powers of Crush itself. I love her relationship with her ex, Lola, I love her father -- I love just about everything and the cliffhanger really surprised me.

I will say that while I love having a world that speaks for itself rather than constant narration, it’s a little hard to follow this world entirely, I’d like a bit more explained than what has been, but at the end of the day I’m very excited to see more.

DC’s Superwoman (2016-present) #11 K. Perkins, José Luís, Ray McCarthy, HI-FI

You know, I have made it clear that I’ve been worried about this title for a while now, really just hoping it was going to find its direction and wow us with the great potential that is the Super Family outside of the main Kent triad. And I feel like that’s for good reason -- the end of Jimenez’s run let a lot of people feeling justifiably scorned, there was a mishandling of a lot of heavy and important subjects that were raised, and at least the initial stuff with Perkins taking over kind of left one wondering if they had a fully formed direction to go toward next.

But I am really glad that I stuck it out for this long because the family of John, Lana, Nat, and everyone else is so important and so fundamentally different from the dynamics found elsewhere in the new familial renaissance of the DCU that I needed it. And I hope it continues to emphasize these relationships and how important they are to each other.

I’m still unhappy with how anxiety and mental illness is being handled in the title and find it lacking since it was brought up to begin with and now being ignored. That subject alone is making me rethink my disinterest in Green Lantern books as a whole because I have loved and felt inspired so far by what I’ve seen of Jessica Cruz and their handling of anxiety, and it’s why I picked up Silk at the high recommendations of a close friend.

So I’d like for mental illness to be treated better in this title -- the least it can do after bringing it up and treating it the way it did at the end of Jimenez’s run, but there’s so much value in the non-nuclear family dynamic of the Irons household and of the uniqueness of Lana’s powers and her approach to fighting crime that it’s worth it. For me anyway.

IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2011-present) #70 Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, Mateus Santolouco, Ronda Pattison

I knew the end of this storyline was going to be, at the very least, explosive but wow, WOW I had no idea how many twists and turns it was going to take in that time. That was a phenomenal ending to the Mutanimals storyline for the time being, and I just feel so bad for Slash, down to my core. I’m so worried about him, and whenever he will be allowed to recover.

At least I hope he’ll recover.

This series is seventy issues strong and i’m just so blown away by the way they still manage to keep me on the edge of my feet while so many different storylines and character developments are happening at the same time.

I mean, I even feel for Old Hobb here!

I do suppose a complaint I could hold here is that the titular turtles themselves have ultimately not been very front and center throughout this storyline, and that really showed in the conclusion, where for the most part they were lost to the colorfulness of the huge, colorful supporting cast that has been developed over the years.

For me, personally, I think that’s honestly okay. We can’t have the same story over and over again with only the main four characters driving the narrative, and it’s been a long standing tradition in TMNT for a good 30 years now to sort of embody the concept that our main guys don’t really look for situations to get involved with but sort of fall into them naturally.

Not to mention it’s probably a strength that 70 issues in, we haven’t once repeated plots or stories or put any of the characters on a loop of development to end up right back where they started. I don’t think the achievement of that can be understated, especially as we near that landmark #75!

DC’s Titans (2016-present) #12 Dan Abnett, Kenneth Rocafort, Dan Brown

Bleh. BLEH. I was holding out judgment on the twist of Wally and Donna and Roy ending up in some kind of love triangle because I wanted the context but honestly the context is kinda... bleh. It would be awesome if we lived in some world and time where Donna’s origins were not constantly retconned and thus the source of her characterization in every run of every thing she showed up in. Which is by no means a new problem but still.

And my opinion is... Wally and Donna are both going through a hard time and Wally is having to accept that his life is fundamentally different from the previous world he knew, that he can’t just badger people into returning things to the way they were -- especially Linda, who he loves but it’s a very one-sided relationship as a result of the parallel universe paradox and stuff. It makes sense to me that in a ploy to gain some sense of control over that, he and Donna both would try to take fate in an unexpected direction, into their own hands.

But making it a love triangle with Roy just kinda keeps my eyes firmly rolled into the back of my skull.

I overall like Lilith, Dick, Garth, and Karen’s development and characterization in this issue. I think they’re taking Lilith in interesting directions and I’m really curious about what her omen means for the future, since apparently there’s a traitor among them. And they set up plenty of reasons for various members to be that traitor in this issue but I can’t help but assume already that it’s going to end up being a twist. Good twist or not remains to be seen.

IDW’s Transformers: Salvation (2017) John Barber, Livid Ramondelli

I’m going to be completely “original” here and say that I’m not a fan of Ramondelli’s at for the various Transformers comics. i know! I know. Shocking, never said before, completely going against the general fandom consensus. I’m such a brave soul. I know.

Okay, joking aside though... I didn’t think the art was bad in this one-shot. Actually! I’d argue a lot of it was even good. He may not be my favorite artist and I’ll think that his colo gradients are butt ugly most of the time, but there was better handled action sequences than usual, the characters looked like they had weight, and we even got a range of expressiveness in the characters that is... well, frankly, not usual for Ramondelli.

So other than that shocking revelation, I thought Barber performed good once more on tying the TF universe together again, answering some prior plot points and nicely knotting off loose ends. Trypticon being a Titan is not the biggest revelation in the world, but the development of Sandstorm and the Dinobots was great, and I loved just how devious Starscream truly is under Barber’s pen even though I’ve fully been enjoying the characterization for him in Till All Are One.

But the most important thing of all: SPARKLINGS. SPARKLINGS. All I’ve wanted for years is baby transformers so I am HAPPY BEYOND BELIEF. THEY’RE NO LONGER A DYING SPECIES AND THESE PRECIOUS BABIES COULD BE BORN WITHOUT EVER KNOWING THE CIVIL WAR AHHHHHHHH

DC’s Wonder Woman (2016-present) #24 Greg Rucka, Bilquis Evely, Romulo Fajardo Jr.

WOW! I mean, just wow! What a resolution to everything. I have so many emotions for Diana, for Barbara Ann, for even Veronica Cale of all people. Etta and Steve were great, the art was amazing.

It’s just such a relief and such... honestly just an amazing feat that Greg Rucka is beginning to wrap up this just phenomenal run of Wonder Woman

I really enjoyed how everything turned out and it was so remarkable to see Diana’s resolution to save Veronica but also to not turn her back on her friends and loved ones as well as the torment it is for Barbara to not be able to get into Themyscira after all her life’s work.

And I liked Diana’s assessment of Veronica at the end, it was true and also blunt to the point of cruelty. But fitting also.

It’s amazing what a turn around I’ve personally felt when it comes to Veronica’s character because in all honesty I was not a fan of her most of the time in the preboot, but Rucka really has fleshed her out and done something unique with her perspective now. There is tragedy but there’s also less deniability for her fault in all of it.

I’m sad to be coming toward Rucka’s end on the run, but I’m also so happy to see the love and passion he’s put into everything culminating to what it is now.

This is a genuinely hard choice but I think if I go by what tugged on my heartstrings the most, what gave me the most joy overall and just feelings unrelenting from start to finish, I would have to say that my pick of the week is All-New Wolverine. I adore this series and I couldn’t be happier with this issue and how they’re keeping my precious Marvel girls faaaaaar away from Secret Empire. A close second would be Wonder Woman but really I would happily recommend my entire pull this week. It was a geat week for comics.

But that’s just my opinion! I’d love to know your thoughts. Agree? Disagree? Think I missed something I should’ve picked up this week? I’d love to hear from you!

#Rena Roundups #SPOILERS #Wednesday Spoilers #All New Wolverine (2015 )#Amazing Spiderman: Renew Your Vows (2016 )#Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2011 )#Detective Comics (2016 )#Gotham Academy: Second Semester #Justice League of America (2016 )#Superwoman (2016 )#Titans (2016 )#Wonder Woman (2016 )#Motor Crush #Transformers: Salvation

20 notes · View notes