Does this live up to TOS episode upon which it is based, in your opinion? I just got it, and will have likely read it by the time peeps here respond.
It sure LOOKS good!
It sure LOOKS good!
John Byrne's Assignment: Earth
- Thread starter Chrisisall
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It's decent enough, but for my money Byrne's best Trek work for IDW (so far) is the Crew mini-series.
I plan on getting that as well!
But his "Frontier Doctor" won't be available until later this year (in collected form, that is).
The first AE issue does a nice job of tying up some loose ends from "Tomorrow is Yesterday".
Very cool. Byrne's obviously a hard core fan...
Second issue, actually. There's one issue set per year from 1968 to 1972, and TiY was set a week before "the first manned moon shot," i.e. July 1969.
It's an entertaining series overall, variable like any anthology. The first issue is a pretty good representation of what a typical Assignment: Earth episode in 1968 might've been like, with international spy stuff and nuclear secrets going on, though a bit more overt about geopolitics than might have been allowed on '60s TV (considering how Mission: Impossible usually featured nameless or fictitious enemy countries rather than coming out and specifying the USSR). The second issue was not bad as a TOS tie-in, though not an ideal A:E "episode" because Gary and Roberta have to be pretty passive throughout. The third issue is set shortly after the 1970 Kent State shootings and deals with the peace movement of the day, but with a sci-fi Evil Plot taking place on campus (a plot that has a sequel in an issue of Crew). The fourth issue culminates a loose arc that's been seeded in the earlier issues and offers some revelations about who's been behind events throughout the series, including the original episode, and gets really sci-fi.
The fifth and final issue was a mixed bag, and it didn't really work for me. It featured President Nixon in a rather caricatured form that's inconsistent with what history records about the man.
Nixon is shown making a pass at Roberta, when the real article was notoriously sexless, never even showing affection to his wife in public.
It featured the USSR and the People's Republic of China collaborating to replace Nixon with an impostor. But despite the American assumption at the time that all Commies were conspiring together at our expense, the USSR and the PRC loathed each other. I have a hard time buying that they'd be as buddy-buddy as shown here.
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Which is what John Byrne was going for. I read his forum on a regular basis, and while he isn't the 'hardcore' fan he makes himself out to be, he is a big fan of that type of storytelling.
^I should amend my statement above... I can believe that a spy story like that could've been told in a 1972 TV show, but I doubt very much that it would've revolved around Nixon himself. They would've used a fictitious US president or perhaps a member of an important Senate subcommittee. Fictional depictions of sitting US presidents were quite rare at the time, the main exception being PT 109, a summer 1963 film in which Cliff Robertson played JFK (though he played a younger JFK, not JFK as president). There were occasional comedy depictions of sitting presidents or thinly veiled caricatures thereof, but in drama or adventure shows it was pretty much unheard of.
Si. Get Smart was one happy exception - whenever the Chief talked to "the President," there were plenty of LBJ-ribbing gags. Nothing offensive of course, usually something playing off the Texas rancher angle, like receiving the call on a steer-horn phone that moos instead of rings. And they never mentioned him by name.
Oh, yeah, there are plenty of instances of implicitly alluding to the current president without naming or showing him. Like the "Limo One" episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, which played off the fact that the then-current president (Carter) was a native of Georgia. For that matter, there was even a Georgia-based sitcom from around that time called Carter Country, in reference to the president, though it had nothing else to do with him. (Oddly enough, it was set in a town called Clinton Corners.)
And lots of movies and shows, mostly comedies, showed unnamed caricatures of the sitting president, such as a Ford caricature in The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
Of course, these days, all bets are off, thanks to things like Saturday Night Live. You had a cartoon Bill Clinton showing up routinely on Animaniacs and Freakazoid, you had Bush Sr. on The Simpsons, Al Gore playing himself on Futurama, Comedy Central did That's My Bush and Lil' Bush, and now Obama's a frequent guest star in comic books.
And lots of movies and shows, mostly comedies, showed unnamed caricatures of the sitting president, such as a Ford caricature in The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
Of course, these days, all bets are off, thanks to things like Saturday Night Live. You had a cartoon Bill Clinton showing up routinely on Animaniacs and Freakazoid, you had Bush Sr. on The Simpsons, Al Gore playing himself on Futurama, Comedy Central did That's My Bush and Lil' Bush, and now Obama's a frequent guest star in comic books.
Based on things John Byrne said on his forum at the time the issue came out, the reason he used a definite Richard Nixon instead of some fictional or unnamed version is because the events would have happened almost forty years ago, and while the feel of the 1972 spy series was intended, the fact of 2008/9 overrode the perceived necessity of concealing the overt references to POTUS.
^Well, yeah, that's pretty self-evident. Even back then, real people from history were fair game in a way that current leaders weren't, as evidenced by the fact that Mission: Impossible almost always featured unnamed or imaginary enemy countries and yet was able to do a number of stories specifically relating to Nazi Germany and real historical figures such as Hitler and Martin Bormann (both of whom Martin Landau got to impersonate).
I was merely acknowledging that it was a departure from the way it would've been done had it actually been a 1972 episode of Assignment: Earth, because I'm obsessively thorough that way.
I was merely acknowledging that it was a departure from the way it would've been done had it actually been a 1972 episode of Assignment: Earth, because I'm obsessively thorough that way.
I gathered as much, I just like to get in the last word.
My Son loved it! Now my turn to read it.
Next- Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor (I have issues 1 & 2)!
Next- Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor (I have issues 1 & 2)!
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