Harry Potter: At the Close.
On my way into work yesterday morning, coming off about three hours’ sleep following the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and hopped up on caffeine and sugar, I got to thinking about the books and movies and what they’ve meant to me as a geek and – more importantly – as a dad over the past 12 years. I turned those reflections into a piece which is posted (appropriately enough) over at Wired – Harry Potter and the Nostalgic GeekDad:
I couldn't assemble all seven books for the photo, because they're so rarely all on the shelf together. I think that's cool.
I really enjoyed writing this one, and hope you enjoy reading it.
Announcing Collect All 21! – the expanded “A Few Special Modifications” eBook edition!
(No, I didn't really mess with Kirk Demarais' awesome Collect All 21! cover - this is just me messing around with my hand-made third-grade bookplate.)
I’m awfully excited to finally be able to share this: Collect All 21! is now officially available as an eBook, thanks to the fantastic guys at Hukilau digital publishing.
I’d been aiming to get the book into a Kindle / Nook / eReader-friendly format for awhile but never had the patience or time to learn the coding skills myself, so when fate – in the form of my friend Jim – conspired to bring me and Hukilau together, I not only jumped at the chance, I wanted to do something special for the new edition. Hence, to quote a certain smuggler, “I’ve added a few special modifications myself.”
Bottom line: There’s more stuff, in the form of a fairly lengthy addendum to the original book. What, you ask? Cue the promo blurb!
This newly-expanded electronic edition includes the author’s interviews with Star Wars cast and crew members reflecting on the saga’s impact from both first-generation-fan standpoints and a career spent bringing the universe to life on-screen.
There are also a few new bits of my own reflections and memories in there, too.
Even better, From A Certain Point of View, is that even with all the bonus material, you’re looking at a significantly lower cover price and no extra shipping costs. Yes, for real. (Not real? That cover/title change. Just messing around for fun.)
So, what are you waiting for? You know at this point you don’t need an actual Kindle or Nook device: iPads, iPhones, Droids (yes, the ones you’re looking for, ha, ha.) – you can get free reading apps on pretty much any handheld device or laptop or desktop or whatever.
Big, big thanks to Matt Kelland and Wade Inganamort at Hukilau for their encouragement and support and for wanting to make this happen.
(Incidentally, the Lulu-published print edition remains available in its original, addendum-free format.)
Now, links, links, links:
Collect All 21! Kindle edition at Amazon
Cheers! Amazon UK Kindle edition.
(Hey – it’s on the German Amazon.de, too – though it’s still in English.)
Barnes & Noble’s Nook edition of Collect All 21!
Hukilau page with nice things people have said about Collect All 21!
If and when it shows up in places like Google’s ebookstore or the Sony eReader store, I’ll post those links too.
The Shadow of the Past, part 1: Ralph Bakshi in Starlog
In addition to the heaping helping of Star Wars Holiday Special goodness that comic show served up a couple weeks back, I was also treated to some Lord of the Rings memory-triggers.
Within the same Starlog magazine (Number 19, Feb. 1979), for starters, are five pages devoted to an interview with Ralph Bakshi about the brand-new big-screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. I remember being excited about and loving the 1977 Rankin/Bass television adaptation of The Hobbit, and while Bakshi’s LOTR has its flaws, I have a soft spot for it – especially the visuals, which immediately turn me into an eight-year-old again, heading out to see it with my mom’s younger brother late one night. (The movie came out in November, 1978, so it’s possible he was visiting us for Thanksgiving.) In Collect All 21!, I wrote:
Uncle Rob was the youngest “grown-up” that I knew, which made him, you know, cool.
For example, he had bought me a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books when I was in first grade. (I got through “The Hobbit” pretty easily, but I’ll admit it was probably fourth or fifth or maybe even sixth grade before I got through the Ring saga itself. As a little kid, those chapters about “Many Meetings” and “The Council of Elrond” seem like they go on and onnnn.) I remember Uncle Rob being stoked about the then-new Lord of the Rings cartoon movie, and taking me to see it at the theater down by the Gold Circle store. He was going to buy me one of the Gollum posters they had for sale in the lobby, but we wound up seeing the last show of the day, and when we came out of the theater, the concession stand was closed.
I don’t remember watching this movie again until the mid-2000s, after the Peter Jackson film trilogy had made its mark. (And for what it’s worth, I was surprised at the similarities between Bakshi’s and Jackson’s interpretations, from a few visual echoes to story changes.)
The Starlog interview with Bakshi is pretty neat – digresson: the author is Ed Naha, whose name struck me as familiar, and sure enough, his book The Making of Dune has been on my shelves since the mid-1980s – and it’s laid out with a pair of gorgeous double-page art spreads. My scanner only handles a page at a time, though, so I had to break them up to post them here:
In addition to this Starlog – which has clearly already delivered its money’s worth, even before you get to its articles on Maren Jensen (Athena from the original Battlestar Galactica), Roger Corman, Buck Rogers (’80s style, of course) and Martian volcanoes – I made one other purchase at the same comic show, but it’s going to get its own post. Hint’s right there in the title.
We have visitors in Zone Twelve, moving east.
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the completion of my summer 2010 solo cross-country road trip, a 15-day odyssey about which I still get nostalgic and which meant a lot to me for many reasons.
It seemed fitting then that this weekend, GeekDad writer / GeekMom senior editor and all-around nifty friend Jenny Williams and her kids swung through our corner of Ohio for a couple days and we all went down and stayed at my mom’s house in the woods of Carroll County. (Last summer, I met Jenny and her family for the first time at her mom’s house, where I stayed my first night on the eastbound trip back home. Which also reminds me: I should probably get around to posting all my eastbound photos on Flickr, now that they’re more than a year old and all.)
So anyway, Jenny and her family are in the midst of their own forty day road trip, and I was extremely excited about seeing them again, and happy to be able to offer them a stopover spot. From Thursday evening until around lunchtime Saturday, we had pretty much a nonstop fantastic time. Lots and lots of talking and game-playing. They introduced me to City Square Off, Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype, Pirate Versus Pirate, and Ninja Versus Ninja. We also played shuffleboard, and on fired up Beatles Rock Band, Rock Band 3 and Pictionary on the Wii.
In between was a bunch of other great stuff: witnessing her kids seeing lightning bugs – or, if you prefer, fireflies :) – for the first time; repeatedly giving in to the temptation of the fresh chocolate-chip-and-Heath-Bits cookies my daughter and her friend baked; grilling dinner on the back porch; and taking everyone to the Dellroy Drive-In for ice cream, where the sign may look like it says “Fish Floats” but the peanut brittle ice cream is out of this world.
Also, at all three of meals we shared, there was bacon, which is worthy of a standalone sentence by virtue of its being bacon.
I know there are people who see the internet and online interaction as these weird technopseudosocial things which stifle actual human interaction, but this weekend has reminded me (and not for the first time) that over the past few years in particular, I have met some great friends with whom I likely never would have crossed paths were it not for teh webz, and I, for one, welcome my Skynet Overlords because of it.
Starlog Number 19: February 1979
Adam and I hung out for awhile today at a local comic show, and I was on the hunt again for some 1970s sci-fi print nostalgia like I stumbled onto a couple weeks ago. We’re side by side, thumbing through boxes of magazines, and Adam discovers this piece of wonder:
Click to enlarge and play "Where's Lion Man?"
I have only watched the Star Wars Holiday Special in its entirety once: The night it aired – my eighth birthday.
There are only four Starlog No. 19 pages devoted to the special – one of which includes the complete text of Natalie Millar’s article, “Star Wars Invades TV”. Here are the other three – (click to make ‘em bigger and really feel the magic) :
"Da-aaad! My X-Wing stopped making the laser noise again!"
Thank you for being a friend in this wretched hive of scum and villainy.
There’s also this ad:
I love this. Why wouldn't I?
Even aside from the Holiday Special content, there’s loads of stuff in these pages that I would have loved as a kid – and still do. I mean, just look at the cover contents again: the animated Lord of the Rings, Superman, Mars volcanoes, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. Funny thing, though: I didn’t read Starlog when I was little. I remember flipping through it occasionally in the Waldenbooks at Belden Village mall, but I never actually bought a copy. No idea why, other than I suppose if I had $1.95 to spare, it was going toward an action figure.
Father’s Day – Music and Memory
Because memory association is what I do, on this Father’s Day, here are five songs that always bring my dad immediately to mind:
Harry Chapin, “Taxi” -
I remember my parents talking about the news when Chapin died, but more vividly I remember being in the car with my Dad, and this being a song for which he specifically turned the radio up and told me he liked it. After the song’s narrator talks about his old flame telling him to keep the change from the “twenty dollars for a two-fifty fare” come the lines:
Well another man might have been angry/ And another man might have been hurt,
But another man never would have let her go. / I stashed the bill in my shirt.
At this point Dad gave me one of those eyebrow-raised “that’s life” half-grins and said, “Yep – Harry’s no fool.”
Sheena Easton, “Telefone” –
I remember when Dad bought Best Kept Secret on cassette. It was the first current pop album I remember him buying, and I seem to think he told me it was one of the albums they listened to at the hospital where he worked as an anesthetist. It’s funny how many fragments of the other songs on the album popped into my head when I read through the track listing for the first time in at least 25 years, but “Telefone” is by far the most prominent in memory. (I think Dad had a little thing for the early/mid-1980s Sheena – neatly balanced , of course, by mom’s little crush on Harrison Ford.)
Lionel Richie, “Hello” -
Because the song came on the radio once in the car, and for some reason, Dad began responding out loud to the lyrics:
“I’ve been alone with you inside my mind …”
“Really, Lionel?”
“And in my dreams I’ve kissed your lips a thousand times.”
“Lionel!” (This was preceded by little gasp of faux-prudish horror and sent me over the edge into laughter.)
My wife never got to meet my Dad, but I told her this story a long time ago, and I’m not sure we’ve ever heard “Hello” and failed to insert Dad’s comments.
The Beach Boys, “Sloop John B” -
Well, I mean, it’s got my name – which is also my Dad’s brother’s name – right there in the title, which Dad always pointed out, and it’s a Beach Boys song from arguably their best and most influential album, so there’s that, too. My parents graduated from high school in 1965, so the The Beach Boys were a big part of the music I heard when I was little, and they later became the first musical act I saw perform live when I went with my parents to Blossom Music Center in my early teens.
Don McClean, “American Pie” -
I remember hearing this song for the first time because we were in the car and Dad made a point of telling me all about how long the song was, and how parts of it were about Buddy Holly’s death and other parts Don McLean had just explained as having no meaning at all.
The song stuck: When I was old enough to drive, I went to the mall and bought a $2 cassette version of it from a bargain bin at Camelot Music (look it up, youngsters) and was disgusted to find it included the cut-in-half “part one” and “part two” single versions. And when I took to hanging index cards with quotes and song lyrics on the inside of my high school locker door, verses from “American Pie” were there.
It’s still a favorite – an absolute gotta-turn-it-up in the car, and if I’m alone, crank it to eleven, sing along, get those adrenaline shivers and remember my Dad.
A Dollar Well-Spent
One of the details I loved in the background of Super 8 was a 1970s-era Warren Presents science fiction magazine which looked a lot like the ones I used to find in the cheap bins at comic book stores.
So, the day after seeing Super 8, I’m at a small, local comic show, and I find this thing of beauty – for a BUCK:
Volume 1, Number 1.
Now, I’m going to buy it anyway, before I even know the price, because it’s got that early “pointy W” in the Star Wars logo, and I think that’s pretty neat. The same logo’s on an interior page, too:
I love that the escape pod overlaps the logo, like it's in front of the letters.
But the treasure-finding’s not over. There’s an ad for Star Wars on 8mm -
"Almost 8 minutes!"
… and one of the more bizarre George Lucas caricatures I’ve seen:
Man, were the '70s weird.
At this point, I’m buying the thing for sure, but it’s not until I get home that I take the time to unfold this masterpiece:
2001: Forbidden Star Odyssey Planet Wars
Art by Michael Stein (art director of the magazine), coloring by Jeff or Geff or Geoff Darrow (it’s spelled all 3 ways within the pages), this works in elements from all three classic movies mentioned on the cover. I struggled to get a good photo without a flash – the creases and the glare made for terrible glare otherwise – so the yellow appearance is actually an effect of the lighting. The glossy poster’s colors are really eye-popping in reality, but I think this still captures the feel of the era and the fandom nicely.
Load “FrigginAwesome”,8,1
I can’t imagine there are ’80s nostalgia geeks out there who don’t know about The Retroist already, but if you’ve never spent time on the site or listening to the podcast, you’re missing a daily dose of Good Stuff, Maynard. Stuff you will wonder how you ever lived without, like the pointer to C64 Yourself, where you can just drag-and-drop a photo and get it rendered almost instantly into a gorgeous Commodore 64-ized version like this:
Me, circa 1984, converted by C64 Yourself.
What makes this photo great? Not because that’s me, but because that’s me sitting at my typically clutter-covered desk playing Burgertime on my Commodore 64.
Large light gray box at the right? A black-and-white TV with rabbit ears serving as my monitor. The darker gray blob just to the left is the C64 itself, with the still-darker area being the keys. In my hands? A beat-to-hell joystick from our original Atari. (You can see the second joystick sitting on the desk almost dead-center: That short white vertical line – that’s right, we had played the covers off the things. Also, my brother Nick had a habit of chewing on them.)
Unfortunately, the C-64′s limited graphics capability falls short of capturing in detail my Gumby sweatshirt and oh-so-80s parted-down-the-middle haircut. Some things are best left pixelated.
Super 8: Home movie.
It took eight and a half hours for me to formulate my first written reaction to Super 8 – and even then all I could muster via Twitter was, “Can’t be impartial about Super 8: I’m too in love with the inspirations and the way it captures the era of my childhood. Fantastic.”
And that’s why this isn’t really a review of the movie. Other people have said the things I think – the best reflection, I think, being the opinion that what makes J.J. Abrams’ blatant homage to the likes of E.T. and Stand By Me and The Goonies and Jaws work so well is its complete sincerity, delivered without clever winks, nods or half-smirks. And I agree with the most positive reviews, although I admit that while I utterly loved it, I the story also never gave me that lump-in-the-throat moment I had expected.
So why did I love this movie so much?
There’s a bit in Wil Wheaton’s The Happiest Days of Our Lives where he writes, “If you’ve seen E.T., you’ve seen houses just like the ones I grew up in.”
I felt that way all through Super 8.
Those houses where the folks of fictitious Lillian, Ohio lived in 1979? I’ve been in them. They were my friends’ houses and my relatives’ houses and our neighbors’ houses, whether here in Stark County or up in Akron or across the state in Upper Sandusky or down in Columbus.
Those nerd-cluttered bedrooms, with science fiction magazines and movie one-sheets and those tiny, square glass Testors model paint bottles and the National Geographic space-shuttle cutaway posters and yes, even the occasional 8 mm movie camera and film reel? Those were the coolest.
Super 8 was filmed in and around Weirton, West Virginia, about 90 miles from here, but from Lillian’s downtown to its industrial mills to its surrounding hills and railroad tracks and nearby river, it just felt so much like an actual place in my memory; like I’d been there – driven through it or knew a kid who moved there or went there once with my parents for some reason. (Geography lesson: The movie places Lillian in an impossible Escher-eqsue way, noting on a map that it’s in the southwest corner of the state, but mentioning Belmont – all the way in the southeast corner – as a neighboring county. I’m OK with that, though: It fits the J.J. Abrams mystery mold perfectly.)
And I felt that way about so much of the movie – the characters, the dialogue and the more everyday aspects of the story: There was a genuine sense of the era and the emotions without feeling like the overt, time-period-as-story-element approach of something like Dazed and Confused or The Wedding Singer.
It felt very much – even though I don’t mean this in a specific my-street, my-school, my-childhood kind of way – like home.
Five things that made my weekend great:
1 ) Super 8 with Jenn & Kelsey Friday night. (Separate blog entry on the movie forthcoming.)
2) Completion of writing and editing duties for a soon-to-be-unveiled project.
3) Saturday: Summerish evening spent taking Kels to drive-in dinner at Sonic, then an hour or so just driving around some of the rural roads and talking. Also – at her request – introduced her to an off-the-beaten-path cemetery where there’s a statue that still kind of spooks me a little. (And yes, Weeping Angels references were made.)
4) North Coast Comic Con: My friend Bryan and I talked about his Giant Monsters Fighting A Lot miniatures game, Kaiju Kaos – which I’m looking forward to playing at GenCon in August – and I caught up with Sean Forney and talked about conventions and other assorted nerditry.
5) Kels & I made a frozen lasagna and Texas toast garlic bread for dinner, watched some Doctor Who while we ate, and followed up with fresh brownies she made as a surprise while I was at the convention.
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