Random SCIFI/Fantasy Thoughts

[HIjol]

What is the best information to date about FTL travel and aging?

Ex., traveling FTL to Alpha Centauri and back. How much time would pass on Earth, and how much time would pass for those on the FTL vehicle? I have read so many different takes on this question. Anyone know what our best answers is, as of now?

 

[Melakon]

So, I recently watched all the "Paula, the Ape Woman" movies from the forties. So how come Paula (who is an ape turned into a woman, or maybe a woman turned into an ape, depending on which movie you're watching) only speaks in the second movie, but is apparently mute in the first and third movies? And how come nobody ever comments on the fact that she (apparently) can't speak in the first movie? It's actually unclear in the film if Paula can't speak or simply has no onscreen dialogue. There's never any expository dialogue along the lines of "You must forgive Paula. The poor girl is mute." Or anything like that.

Weird.

If you had mentioned Acquanetta, I would have remembered her from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I'd never heard her called "Paula, the Ape Woman" before.

 

[davejames]

Here's another random thought.

In Star Trek 4 Kirk mentions that they don't have money in the future, but in Star Trek 6 Scotty mentions that he just bought a boat. What gives, do they have money or not?

Well I think by money Kirk just meant the traditional paper currency and coins. But they do have credits of some kind (even though I was never quite sure how those were earned).

 

[CorporalCaptain]

As per DS9 "In the Cards," Earth doesn't use money at all, whereas clearly the Federation does. Thus, it splits the difference.

 

[Starborn Dragon]

The movie Excalibur is an illustration of two of the Christian ten commandments, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods and thou shalt not commit adultery.

The most critical moment of the movie is when Uther coveted Igraine, with the second most critical moment is when Gwenivere had her affair with that knight.

But the far most important and most critical moment of the movie is when Uther coveted Igraine and her real husband was killed. If it weren't for that moment, Arthur would never have been born, Morganna would never of had that psychic vision of her father being killed in battle, and there would be no Camelot.

2

The movie is claimed to be based on the book Le Morte D'Arthur. You can read the book over at the Gutenberg project, but the movie is nothing like book.

For instance, did you know that Morganna was married and her husband sent to to stay in a Monastery? It was there she learned about Necromancy.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Does anyone wish All Along the Watchtower would have played an integral role from the beginning of NuBSG? I think it would have been cool if the song would have been a plot point from the beginning and not just at the end of the series. I think it was a great concept that could have been better executed.

Weirdly enough, All Along the Watchtower was going to be in the first season finale when Starbuck and Helo (I believe) walked into a cafe and turned on a juke box.

That's another reason I think BSG is an endless time loop. The odds of a song - any song - being written in the Twelve Colonies and then, millennia later, the EXACT SAME SONG being written on Earth, are so absolutely remote as to be almost zero...that is the most amazing coincidence ever. The only way I can explain it is if the colonies are, technically, in our future (via the time loop).

 

[Greg Cox]

So, I recently watched all the "Paula, the Ape Woman" movies from the forties. So how come Paula (who is an ape turned into a woman, or maybe a woman turned into an ape, depending on which movie you're watching) only speaks in the second movie, but is apparently mute in the first and third movies? And how come nobody ever comments on the fact that she (apparently) can't speak in the first movie? It's actually unclear in the film if Paula can't speak or simply has no onscreen dialogue. There's never any expository dialogue along the lines of "You must forgive Paula. The poor girl is mute." Or anything like that.

Weird.

If you had mentioned Acquanetta, I would have remembered her from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I'd never heard her called "Paula, the Ape Woman" before.

Well, that's how she was listed in the credits. "And Acquanetta as Paula, the Ape Woman." And, of course, a different actress played Paula in the third movie . . . .

But, yeah, it probably couldn't have hurt to have mentioned Acquanetta or the names of the movies . . ..

 

[Dales]

Thought 1

1.the star wars prequels are not as bad as people say. I think many people say they hate the prequels because it feels like the cool thing to say. I have the prequels on rerun than the trilogy.

Thought 2

2. the dark knight is overrated there are much better comic films out there like X2, Days of future past and spiderman 2.

Thought 3

3. I don't like the way at times the bible or Christianity gets ridiculed in many sci fi and fantasy series.

 

[Greg Cox]

In light of Christopher Lee's 93rd birthday:

As far as I know, Lee is the only actor to have played Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes AND Sir Henry Baskerville in different Holmes movies.

But why on Earth has he never been cast as Moriarity?

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

Does anyone wish All Along the Watchtower would have played an integral role from the beginning of NuBSG? I think it would have been cool if the song would have been a plot point from the beginning and not just at the end of the series. I think it was a great concept that could have been better executed.

Weirdly enough, All Along the Watchtower was going to be in the first season finale when Starbuck and Helo (I believe) walked into a cafe and turned on a juke box.

I think that would have been some good foreshadowing.

(Hey, nobody said we couldn't have random thoughts about less-than-modern movies!)

Nope, this thread is dedicated to any movie or television series in the SCIFI/ Fantasy category of any time. Hopefully it will be a long running thread.

I haven't seen this movie you're talking about, but it sounds interesting.

 

[Greg Cox]

Does anyone wish All Along the Watchtower would have played an integral role from the beginning of NuBSG? I think it would have been cool if the song would have been a plot point from the beginning and not just at the end of the series. I think it was a great concept that could have been better executed.

Weirdly enough, All Along the Watchtower was going to be in the first season finale when Starbuck and Helo (I believe) walked into a cafe and turned on a juke box.

I think that would have been some good foreshadowing.

(Hey, nobody said we couldn't have random thoughts about less-than-modern movies!)

Nope, this thread is dedicated to any movie or television series in the SCIFI/ Fantasy category of any time. Hopefully it will be a long running thread.

I haven't seen this movie you're talking about, but it sounds interesting.

There were actually three movies: Captive Wild Woman, Jungle Woman, and Jungle Captive. (Although none of them actually take place in the jungle.)

Be warned that they're not really very good, and probably sound more fun than they actually are, but how can you resist a series of B-movies about a woman who turns into a gorilla . . . and vise versa?

 

[JD]

I wonder if the writers of The Big Bang Theory were familiar with those movies when they wrote the arc with Penny doing the killer ape/woman movies.

I'm really amazed how similar a lot of the Marvel and DC characters are, and that one of them hasn't sued the other over it.

 

[Greg Cox]

I wonder if the writers of The Big Bang Theory were familiar with those movies when they wrote the arc with Penny doing the killer ape/woman movies.

I'm really amazed how similar a lot of the Marvel and DC characters are, and that one of them hasn't sued the other over it.

Maybe. As I understand it, ape-woman transformations were once a staple of carnival sideshows as well, back in the day. Probably some weird pop-cultural reaction to Darwinism or something.

As for superheroes, I can be very hard to pinpoint the "first" anything, since there's almost always some earlier inspiration or influence, which probably makes such lawsuits problematic.

Super-strength? That goes back to Hercules at least, not to mention Philip Wylie's novel "Gladiator." A mysterious vigilante with a secret identity? Hello, Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Cyborgs, mutants, telepaths, mystics, mer-people . . . all very old sci-fi cliches that were around long before comic books existed.

Which might make it harder to prove that your super-powerful mutant cyborg ninja is a unique creation.

 

[publiusr]

My theories about nuBSG:

- Original BSG is the sequel. Everyone in BSG-TOS is actually descended from humanoid Cylons, who went back to the original Twelve Colonies, rebuilt them, and repopulated them. Eventually they forgot they were ever Cylons.

- On a related note: The whole of BSG, both old and new, is a time loop. Earth - our Earth - eventually sends an expedition into space to start a colony. The expedition is swept back in time somehow, and does manage to start the colony. This colony is Kobol....

My thought was that Caprica was rebuilt, the human cylons advanced and became the folks who made the City Of Light, and the blasted Earth became Terra--home of the Eastern Alliance.

An odd sci-fi film you should take a look at--Immortal: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0893492/

Another fav'
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168124/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

 

[JD]

I've seen Immortal. I didn't get it.

 

[davejames]

I still think Spielberg's A.I. and War of the Worlds are two of the absolute best and most underrated scifi films of the last 15 years. So there.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think that the look and general ambiance of Spielberg's War of the Worlds are absolutely outstanding. Unfortunately, the needless updating of the original, chiefly in writing out Mars and in having the war machines be already waiting on Earth, really count as major demerits. Still, I generally recommend the film.

 

[davejames]

I think that the look and general ambiance of Spielberg's War of the Worlds are absolutely outstanding. Unfortunately, the needless updating of the original, chiefly in writing out Mars and in having the war machines be already waiting on Earth, really count as major demerits. Still, I generally recommend the film.

Those were definitely some cool elements of the original book, but for this movie I have to agree with Spielberg's reasoning that an alien invasion from space would have just felt way too cliched and obviously scifi from the start, since it's already been done so often. And that they needed to somehow make the origin feel a bit more mysterious and scary and hard to explain to fit the darker mood he was going for.

Plus so much of it is told only from the ground-level perspective of one family anyway-- which to me is the most important thing the movie got right from the book. People get hung up on not seeing enough of the battles or worldwide destruction, but in the book the narrator doesn't really describe a whole lot of that either. He's just scrambling along the countryside the whole time trying his best to survive.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think that the look and general ambiance of Spielberg's War of the Worlds are absolutely outstanding. Unfortunately, the needless updating of the original, chiefly in writing out Mars and in having the war machines be already waiting on Earth, really count as major demerits. Still, I generally recommend the film.

Those were definitely some cool elements of the original book, but for this movie I have to agree with Spielberg's reasoning that an alien invasion from space would have just felt way too cliched and obviously scifi from the start, since it's already been done so often. And that they needed to somehow make the origin feel a bit more mysterious and scary and hard to explain to fit the darker mood he was going for.

An invasion from space is what it was, anyway.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

I still think Spielberg's A.I. and War of the Worlds are two of the absolute best and most underrated scifi films of the last 15 years. So there.

I still haven't seen A.I., but War of the Worlds was mediocre. I'm not a Tom Cruise hater either, I loved Minority Report and more recently, Edge of Tomorrow. I like most of his movies, but War of the Worlds just didn't do it for me. I'm also not a big fan of remakes, but there are some exceptions like the Thing, but for the most part, I don't like them.