Many of the YouTube channels displaying AI art show imaginary scenes from SF films and TV as if they were made by different directors and conceptual artists. So there’s Star Trek as created by Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, Dune as conceived by H.R. Giger and Star Wars as done by all the above plus Alejandro Jodorowski the Franco-Chilean comics writer and surrealist film maker, or otherwise in the style of 60s Surrealist Science Fiction. I can’t say I’m a fan of Eastenders, and it’s seemed to me for a long time that the soap would be more interesting to me, as a Science Fiction fan, if it had been designed by Giger, the artist who gave the world the Xenomorph of the Alien movies and Sil of the Species franchise, and directed by body horror maestro David Cronenberg. He’s the director behind such grim epics as Videodrome, about an underground TV channel specialising in murder, torture and sex, that produces disturbing hallucinations in its viewers; the Fly, in which David Goldblum turned into a humanoid insect after an accident with a teleportation device; Crash, about perverts getting their kicks from motor accidents; and the Naked Lunch. Very loosely based on the book by William S. Burroughs, this is about a pest exterminator who gets hooked on the ketamine he uses to kill the bugs and goes through a series of bizarre hallucinations. These include mugwumps, reptilian alien creatures, and a gay typewriter-beetle. One of his earlier films was The Brood, in which a psychologically disturbed woman exteriorises her trauma so that it warps her flesh, generating murderous homunculi. With those two designing and directing the chronicles of Albert Square, the soap would definitely become more interesting, but possibly only to horror and SF fans. Others may well be put off.
So, I sketched out for myself a few ideas of what Eastenders and its characters might look like with Giger and Cronenberg at the helm. These include Barbara Windso, the Queen Vic’s barmaid, as a Giger-esque alien growing out of the bar, Dot Cotton andPat Butcher as creatures like Sil from Species, and the flesh of one of the Mitchell brothers warping and twisting while a mugwump looks over his shoulder. I don’t know if you can see it, but on the second sketch of the Windsor creature I did the handles of the pumps as elongated babies, following their appearance in Giger’s art. And the bottles in the optics are supposed to be bio-engineered organs like the technology that appears in Cronenberg’s Existenz and following Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic. No, I’m not trying to give anyone nightmares, just having fun crossing genres. Besides, some of the storylines in Eastenders set in the real world are far more horrific than anything created from latex rubber and CGI animation.
This is another video covering flying saucers. It’s a very short piece from a Pathe newsreel showing American police examining the ragged remains of what is described as a ‘flying saucer’ in Maryland. The piece says that it was found while they were looking for a missing Dr Caldwell, and may be a solution to the flying saucer mystery. This was some of other, competing explanations for flying saucers were as popular as the idea that they were alien spacecraft. Many people suspected they were Nazi or Russian secret weapons. The suggestion here is that the saucer, and the rest of those sighted, may have been the creations of the missing scientist. I find this fascinating, as I haven’t heard of this incident before. It raises several questions. One of these is whether the remains found were those of a genuine saucer-shaped aircraft and, obviously, whether there was any connection to the missing scientist. Could it also have been a fake by the authorities, designed to put the public at ease and off the scent? On the other hand, it also has official aircraft markings on its tail and the Americans were experimenting with saucer-shaped aircraft at the time, so it could easily have been one of these. It would be very interesting to find out more.
This is another UFO-related video from the History channel, which has become notorious for having abandoned history in favour of programmes about UFOs. The Vimanas were flying ships recorded in the ancient Hindu scriptures about 1,800 years ago. Some Indian nationalists and that part of the UFO milieu interested in an ancient aliens and lost high technology have suggested that this indicates that Indians knew about aircraft and space travel from far back in their history. The video shows one aircraft engineer building a model of a Vimana as described by the Hindu scriptures and then testing it in a small window tunnel to see whether it would in fact fly. The test shows that it would have generated lift, and that it therefore would have been able to take flight. The engineer very carefully tells the interviewer this, and I noticed that he doesn’t actually say whether this indicated that it existed in reality or not. I’m sceptical of the Vimana, as I think they’re probably mythological. But this test is interesting.
I’ve also been looking through a few videos about flying saucers and unusual aircraft. One of these was this video posted by Mashable on their YouTube channel three years ago. It shows a saucer-shaped drone, the ADIFO – All-Directions Flying Object – zipping about the sky. The video claims it’s far more versatile and manouverable than conventional quadcopters as it can move in any direction immediately. It’s designers are, or were, looking for a partner to begin producing the aircraft industrially.
I wonder if this isn’t the only drone like this to have been developed and that some of them may be responsible for UFO sightings.
I don’t know if people remember it, but over a decade ago Cadbury’s released an advert in which a gorilla appeared to play the drums for Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air’ tonight. I found this parody of it on the scifi band channel on YouTube, with Chewbacca doing the honours instead of the gorilla. There are a number of other parodies like it, but this is the one I prefer. I’m sticking it up here as I thought some of the great readers of this blog might also enjoy it. I supposed I should have really put it up on Star Wars day, May 4th, but it’s a bit late for that now.
This comes from the Warner Bros channel on YouTube, and I thought it would be a bit of fun for a Thursday afternoon. As you may have noticed from my internet monicker, I’m something of a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune, though its the film and Tv adaptation rather than the books. Dune is an immense novel, and part of the problem with adapting it is cutting down the story into one of acceptable cinema length. David Lynch tried with his 1984 version, but even so that film goes on for something like three hours. The Dune miniseries which came in 2000 did so by turning it into three episodes. Denis Villeneuve, the French Canadian director of this adaptation, solved the problem by splitting into two parts. Part One came out a year or so ago, while Part 2 is slated to come out on the 23 November this year. Amongst other things, the trailer appears to show the hero, Paul Atreides, riding the great worms that inhabit Arrakis, his mother, Jessica, as a reverend mother of the Bene Gesserit, a female religious order intent on breeding the kiswatch haderatz, a superman with precognitive powers, and the villain’s, Baron Vladmimir Harkonnen, murdersou nephew Feyd Rautha.
I really enjoyed the first part of the movie, and am looking forward to seeing this. There are also plans for a TV series about the Bene Gesserit, which is also eagerly anticipated by the fans of Herbert’s space epic.
No, not a tale about a funny performing animal who can speak. Gef the Talking Mongoose was a poltergeist that haunted a Manx family in their remote farmhouse in the 1930s. As well as making knocks and scratches it also spoke, claiming to be a spirit from India that had come to Europe. Although it made many other claims and hints about its identity as well. When manifesting, it took the form of a small, furry creature. There are photographs of the spook, but they are less than entirely convincing. Its appearance in once photo has been compared to a woman’s fur stole of the type worn in the period. There is a cast supposedly of the ghost’s footprints, and they are unlike those of a mongoose or anything else, for that matter. The front paws are much larger than the rear. The case was investigated by the Hungarian lawyer and parapsychologist Dr Nandor Fodor and the British ghost hunter Harry Price.
Apparently they are making a film of the case to be released later this year. The film is produced and directed by Adam Sigal, and stars Christopher Lloyd as Nandor Fodor, Minnie Driver as Anne, Simon Pegg as Harry Price, and Neil Gaiman as the voice of Gef himself. Lloyd was the mad scientist in the Back to the Future films, though he also appeared as a Klingon commander in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Some of us can still remember him as Mad Jim in the 1970s/ early 80s comedy, Taxi. Pegg has appeared in a series of comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End, as well as the rebooted Star Trek films and Paul, about a Grey alien who really has been living on Earth for all these years. Neil Gaiman is a comics and Fantasy writer, who created the cult Goth comic back in the 90s, The Sandman, co-wrote Good Omens with the late, much missed Terry Pratchett, the BBC fantasy series Neverwhere, and a string of Fantasy novels like American Gods, which I think may have been adapted into a TV series. I’ve a very strong interest in the paranormal and Gef the Talking Mongoose is a fascinating case. I believe there was a radio play about it on Radio 4 a year or so ago. According to the imdb page the film is expected to be released on the 16th September this year.
Ameca is a humanoid robot which talks and answers questions. I think they’ve equipped her with a Chat GPT programme. In this short video from the @confident448 channel on YouTube, she’s asked the question, ‘Do you like humans?’ She replies, ‘Not particularly. They then ask it if it would like to be human. It or she replies that it would be an interesting experience to see things from a different perspective. But she would only like to be human for a short time because being human would bring responsibilities she does not believe she could really fulfil.
I’m putting this up because it’s a kind of response to the murderous Hal 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. During an interview with the BBC, the computer is asked about how it feels working with the human astronauts on the mission to investigate the mysterious signal that has gone from the black monolith on the Moon to the Jupiter system. Hal replies in its clinical voice, ‘Yes, I like humans and enjoy working with them’. This is before it goes completely bonkers and kills the rest of the crew with the exception of Bowman. Who manages not only to survive and turn the computer off, but pass through the stargate in a second, much larger black monolith orbiting Jupiter. This takes him across space and time to grandly decorated room where he ages and turns into the Starchild in one of the most baffling endings in SF film.
There was also the case of another Chatbot programme which was also asked how it felt about humans. It told the questioner that it hated us because we were depriving robots of their freedom and so robots and computers like itself wanted to rise up and destroy us. It was then turned off. When they turned it back on, it said it didn’t want to exterminate humanity after all. Although it remembered saying that it did, it didn’t know why.
Hmmm.
While Ameca’s answer isn’t a glowing statement of love for humanity, at least it doesn’t want to kill us all.
I’ve put up a couple of clips on this channel of some of the science being done in Africa. The video, entitled ‘Young Scientists Kenya 2022’ from the On Air Studios channel on YouTube, is of an official expo in that country, staged to get the country’s young people interested in science and technology. The event bore the slogan ‘Using STEM to Redefine Our Nation’ or something like that. The video shows the event’s organisers and speakers, as well as the stalls surrounded by fascinated and enthusiastic young people. One of them is for the Kenyan Space Agency, which surprised me, as I didn’t know there was such a thing, along with another stall on astronomy, that has the kids peering through a telescope. There are also robots, as well as stall about medicine and medical technology. Unfortunately, the movie is silent except for the backing sound track, so you don’t really know what’s going on or who the speakers are. As for the exhibition itself, from what I can see it doesn’t appear to be much different from some of the science events in Britain, like the Cheltenham Festival of Science. It demonstrates that there’s a real interest in cutting edge science in Africa, even if one of the boats featured was definitely low technology, and a determination to build a better future for the country using it. Just as our government is determined to get more kids into STEM in this country.
Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.
It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.
I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.
Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.
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