[Some fun links at the post, which went up on 29 December 2013. Not a lot of comments, but they’re still fun! Enjoy!]
We’re still under the weather here, and I had another crushing deadline on a project that really had to be done by the end of the year, and, well … something had to give. So this week in lieu of the usual column I’m just going to point you to some other fun internet things I ran across that may be of interest. X-Men, a new Star Trek series, interesting old “men’s adventure” books, a new Wonder Woman.
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“How Would you Fix …?” Nathan Adler does a blog devoted to continuity fixes — the kind of thing that used to earn you a No-Prize from Marvel, back in the day. I always enjoy reading it because — well, because I’m a huge nerd. But I like the challenge of working out the fix as well as spotting the inconsistency, and I’ve always felt that should be a fan thing, whether it’s just sitting around shooting the breeze at a convention or reading your paper on Professor Moriarty’s Dynamics of an Asteroid at the Baker Street Irregulars annual banquet. When pros do it, like when Roy Thomas or John Byrne tried to do actual stories based on continuity patching it just gets kind of embarrassing.
Anyway, Nathan shares my nerdy pleasure at working out the fix and I like reading his theories even when I may not agree with them. The current entry has him trying to figure out the origin of Gateway from the X-Men’s Outback era.
I enjoyed it and I bet X-fans will get a kick out of it. Link here. While you’re there you could do worse than to amble through the archives, there’s lots of other interesting speculations to think about and argue over.
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End of the Quest: I have a soft spot for “men’s adventure” trashy numbered series paperbacks from the sixties and seventies, and the king of them all was Mack Bolan, the Executioner.
I’m a bit of a purist in that I only care about the originals that Don Pendleton actually wrote himself — the first thirty-eight of them, starting with War Against the Mafia and ending with Satan’s Sabbath.
There are about seven hundred other ones ghosted by various hands, and all sorts of spinoffs like Able Team and Stony Man and so on. But I haven’t bothered with any of them though I gather that some of them are quite good.
My first encounter with the Punisher’s spiritual godfather was in an omnibus edition I picked up in a drugstore, collecting the first three novels. Lost it in a move and I’ve been trying to get it back for years … not obsessively, of course, but it’s one of those things that’s always in the back of my head when I go into a used bookstore.
It seems silly when the first three books are easy to scoop up used for less than a buck each. But I’m sentimental, and I wanted my omnibus three-in-one back, dammit. It really was getting to be a thing with me because most booksellers thought I was making it up or had gotten mixed up somehow. I couldn’t remember what the exact title was and with six or seven hundred Bolans out there, online searches were fruitless; even Mack Bolan fan sites didn’t seem to know about it. I was about ready to give up.
And that’s when I found one. finally.
It’s called The Executioner Trilogy: The Beginning and it’s apparently a little bit of a collector’s item… even Linda Pendleton herself says they’re hard to find. Anyway, if you want one of your own, listings are here. You’ll see that prices start to spin out of control for it pretty damn quick. I assure you I did not pay nearly that much for mine, but now I am gloating over it far more than any grown man should.
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Trekking, old-school: There was a cool Star Trek fan-film project that came out a few years ago, a movie called Of Gods and Men.
It starred Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig and the interesting thing about it is that it’s the only project that brought together actors from every single iteration of Trek — in addition to Ms. Nichols and Mr. Koenig, you had Grace Lee Whitney and Lawrence Montaigne from the original series, Alan Ruck from Generations, Tim Russ and Garrett Wang and Ethan Phillips from Voyager, Cirroc Lofton and Chase Masterson from Deep Space Nine, Gary Graham from Enterprise, and even James Cawley from New Voyages. The story dealt with an aging, vengeful Charlie X using the Guardian of Forever to remove James Kirk from the timeline. In terms of the movies I guess you could call it … oh, Star Trek 6.5, let’s say. You can read more about it here [Edit: Sorry, that’s dead!], and view the whole movie here.
But the reason I brought it up is because they’re doing it again. Tim Russ directed Of Gods and Men and he’s reassembled a lot of the same cast and crew for the pilot to a new series, Star Trek: Renegades.
The web site is here [Edit: Sorry, nope], and the new trailer for the project is here. The short version, as nearly as I can tell, is that it’s basically the Dirty Dozen in Starfleet. Which sounds like fun to me, and the cast they’ve lined up is pretty impressive considering it’s a crowdfunded fan project. Julie and I are certainly looking forward to it.
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One for Kelly: And finally, speaking of fan films, here’s a Wonder Woman short that showed up a couple of months ago, for the three or four of you that missed it [Edit: Whoops, presumably the No-Fun Lawyers at Warner Bros. didn’t dig this, ’cause it ain’t there no more!].
I’m not all that invested in Wonder Woman as a character but it always has befuddled me that the fan films about her generally are better than the official ones. If I was the Time-Warner guy in charge of the new movie, I’d be trying to get this actress on the phone to at least come in and read for Diana. Your mileage may vary.
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And there you go. Back next week with a full column, I promise. See you then.
A while back I picked up a couple old Executioner paperbacks in memory of Greg. #3, Battle Mask, and #22, Hawaiian Hellground. As usual, I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet.
Of Gods and Men is well worth watching.
It really is.
Too bad, though, that Renegades was not as good (and then sort of fizzled out after they were sort of forced to remove the Star Trek branding when a web series was being planned).
I’d almost forgotten about that Wonder Woman short. Too bad it’s no longer available anywhere – I still think the actress who plays WW in it captures the look better than anyone else since Lynda Carter (sorry Gal Godot, but you know it’s true).
I had the Executioner Omnibus, which I got via mail order, when the originals were still being printed. When I was in high school, in the mid-80s, I used to pick up the newer Bolan’s (Stony Man Doctrine, the first “Super Bolan” was the first I read) and the Able Team and Phoenix Force books (Able Team had a better character mix and those were usually better plots),; but, they still had reprintings of the earlier Pendleton books. I had a smattering of them and the whole “Last Mile” finale, where each title included a day of the week, as Bolan went on one final sweep of the Mafia, before going to work for the government, in the new series. You could order some titles from the publisher and they had the omnibus listed. I had books #2 and 3, but had never been able to locate #1, War Against The Mafia and this was long before the Internet and Bookfinder.com or Amazon. So, here it was in a collected volume and the inclusion of the next two did form a nice trilogy. The opening volume starts the series and gives you Bolan’s background and motivation. In book #2, Death Squad, he assembles a team of Vietnam vets to attack the Mafia, but they are caught by police, while he escapes, thanks to sympathetic policeman Carl Lyons. Lyons and two of the Death Squad members, “Politician” Blancanales and “Gadget” Schwartz, would be joined by Lyons to form Able Team, in the spin-off. The third volume, “Battle Mask,” had Bolan undergo plastic surgery to alter his face, to help avoid the police and the infiltrate Mafia families and carry out his attacks. After that, Bolan travels the country destroying various local Mafia branches, with the title reflecting the location. He soon got a tricked out van, The War Wagon, and other recurring characters. However, after a few of those books, you tended to get the same plots and a formula had been established. Some were a bit more inventive, but they started to feel generic after 4 or 5 of them. The Last Mile was an interesting deviation, as Bolan has been offered a pardon, in exchange for working for the government, hunting down terrorists. He brokers one last spree, over a week, to hit the main Mafia families. So, those have a bit of a ticking clock propelling them to the end. Pendleton was still listed as the author when the new series launched; but, I don’t believe he wrote any of them.
Able Team was the more interesting variation, for me, for the spin-offs, as it got into some of America’s covert wars in Latin America (the Reagan years), but took a very anti-regime stance about governments like El Salvador and Honduras, where “death squads” had murdered union organizers, peace activists and clergy. Most of the mens adventure books were fairly Right Wing or reactionary, at best managing Center Right; but, Able Team kind of vacillated between Center Right and Center Left, in its politics.
Lot of gun worship in both versions of Bolan and the spin-offs, to the point that they were including illustrations of various weapons, at the end of each book. They even included a grenade launcher that only existed in Hollywood, the XM-18. This was featured in the film The Dogs of War and a two-part Magnum PI, where Magnum goes back to Vietnam to hunt for an MIA friend. It featured a launch tube and a cylinder that held 40 mm grenade rounds and rotated as grenades were fired, like a giant revolver pistol. It was not a real weapon, though there were a couple of smaller launchers that were similar, produced by a couple of companies for police use, for riot control.
I’m still surprised that Hollywood never produced a Bolan movie or tv pilot, given the popularity of the series in the 80s and the political climate. There were negotiations a few time and Burt Reynolds was supposedly interested, at one point, and talk in the late 80s of a potential film, that went nowhere…while we got rip-off movies, like The Exterminator and comic book wannabes, like The Punisher, The Vigilante and Wild Dog.