Friday, October 4, 2013

4 October 2013


Birthdays
Ryan Lee b. 1996 (Super 8)
Alicia Silverstone b. 1976 (Batman & Robin)
Abraham Benrubi b. 1969 (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Liev Schreiber b. 1967 (The Last Days on Mars, X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Christoph Waltz b. 1956 (The Green Hornet, The Zero Theorem)
Christopher Fairbank b. 1953 (The Fifth Element, Alien 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides)
Armand Assante b. 1949 (Judge Dredd)
Susan Sarandon b. 1946 (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cloud Atlas)
Anne Rice b. 1941 (Interview with a Vampire)
Horst Janson b. 1935 (Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter)
Edward Judd b. 1932 died 24 February 2009 (First Men in the Moon)
Charlton Heston b. 1923 died 5 April 2008 (Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man)

With the exception of Anne Rice, it's an all actor list today. I put up Charlton Heston in the Picture Slot not because I like him - I hated his politics and he was a terrible ham as an actor - but instead because he was willing to be in sci-fi movies before it was cool. While Star Trek and Star Wars are obviously the game changers when it comes to the success level you can expect with a sci-fi series, the Planet of the Apes franchise also was an important step forward in Hollywood's acceptance of the genre as a money-making machine.

Many happy returns of the day to all the living.
 

Prediction: By 1974, boxing has been made illegal. Instead human looking robots are the fighters.

Predictor: The Twilight Zone episode Steel, written by Richard Matheson, starring Lee Marvin, first aired 4 October 1963

Reality: First, if Charlton Heston overplayed nearly every role in his career, I give props to Lee Marvin for his ability to under-play. If you know the episode, his robot malfunctions and he goes into the ring himself in order to get paid. He's supposed to be a machine with one facial expression here, but you can still read a little bit of his pride, his hope and his dread even in this still photo.

As for reality, we haven't outlawed boxing and now it struggles to remain relevant compared to Ultimate Fighting, a set of rules that allows things like kicking, wrestling and hitting a person after they are on the ground.

If this prediction gets even partial points, it would be a couple of decades later that fighting robots would be popular, but they wouldn't look even remotely human.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

An exact date from a story in Collier's magazine that scared the bejeezus out of people in 1947.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
 

3 comments:

  1. I watched The Omega Man the other night, and one thing to be said for Heston. He had an ALARMING mouth full of teeth. And when he grimaced, it looked like the grill from an old Buick.

    Interesting that in that movie and Soylent Green, he had roles where inter-racial sex featured. Not a common thing in movies at the time, and treated as matter-of-factly as it should be.

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    Replies
    1. Good point about inter-racial sex and sci-fi. I'm not sure it exactly counts as a prediction, and most sci-fi doesn't treat as something to be pointed out, though I remember it being a plot point in the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven.

      Star Trek gets credit for TV's first inter-racial kiss, but the scene is kind of creepy/rapey because neither Kirk or Uhura have free will at the time.

      Good points, ZRMcD. Thanks for commenting, as always.

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    2. it being a plot point in the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven.

      both versions, actually, although the more modern version downplayed it quite a bit. The older one treated more as a delightful diversity.

      The newer, big budget version is far inferior to the low budget public TV version.

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