So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Christopher]

There is a complete series DVD set of the Family Channel/Newline Duncan Regehr “Zorro” series that I managed to buy several years back, after it had already gotten kind of hard to find. Looking… Yeah, I bought it off Amazon in February 2014 for $51.94. Looking at what it’s going for now. YIKES!!! $239.98 (used)/$258.89 (new). I sure am glad I bought it when I did!

I'm surprised they don't have it on Disney+ along with the Guy Williams series. Or on Netflix with the Banderas movies.

They have a few of the Zorro serials on Tubi, and they're all on YouTube, though the fifth one is only available in very poor image quality. YouTube also has a low-quality videotape transfer of Zorro and Son, the really weak early '80s sitcom that ran for five episodes. That was the second time Henry Darrow played Don Diego, after the Filmation animated series. (The sitcom, which Disney produced, tried to get Guy Williams to reprise his role, so I guess Darrow was their fallback choice.) Between those and the Regehr series where he was Don Alejandro, that's three Zorro productions that Darrow was in, though the second hardly counts.

George J. Lewis was also in three Zorro productions, sort of. Before he was Don Alejandro in the Guy Williams series, he was in two of the Republic serials. He was the male lead in Zorro's Black Whip, the one that wasn't about Zorro at all but a similar female vigilante called the Black Whip; and he regrettably played a culturally assimilated "Indian" sidekick to a pre-Lone Ranger Clayton Moore as Zorro's grandson in Ghost of Zorro. Don Diamond was also in three productions -- he was Cpl. Reyes in the Williams series, the voice of the Filmation series's Sgt. Gonzales (who was modeled after Garcia from the Williams show), and a bit guest star in a Zorro and Son episode. Before any of them, though, there was Noah Beery Sr., who was Sgt. Gonzalez in the 1920 silent The Mark of Zorro and the main villain in the first Republic serial Zorro Rides Again (about Zorro's modern-day descendant).

Sorry -- I have these outbursts of trivia a lot. It's a hereditary condition.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Yanks: A.E.F. Verse, edited by John T. Winterich, a collection of Great War poetry by American soldiers, originally published in Stars and Stripes. (Project Gutenberg link.)

The soldiers on the Western Front wrote a lot of poetry about the war and their experiences. Everyone probably knows John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," and British Commonwealth countries know Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen." Serious scholars know Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and Young Indy fans are aware of Rupert Graves. McCrae was Canadian, the rest I've named were from the British Isles.

But what about Americans?

You may know of Alan Seeger, the uncle of Pete Seeger, who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and died in 1916, and wrote "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." He's probably the best known American Great War poet, but you have to dig deep to even be aware of Seeger.

Yanks, an anthology published in 1919, collects some of the best poetry published in Stars and Stripes during the war. If this is a representative sample of the poetry the American doughboys wrote, then there's a reason why American Great War poetry has passed out of cultural memory -- it's not especially good. There are some interesting ideas in here, I liked a poem about a doughboy trying to interest his French girlfriend in a regimental baseball game, one or two poems had admirable moments, but by and large it's forgetable stuff, meaningful in the moment it was written, a record of what the soldiers in the lines thought at the time, and a look at what American culture in 1918 was like. The anti-German propaganda of the time comes through strongly at times. There's a strange lack of place due to wartime censorship, something one poem tackles head on.

There's also far more optimism in the poems than you'd find from the British war poets. The American experience on the Western Front was very different from what the British experienced. They had years of trench hell. The Americans arrived in 1918, were held back to the dismay of the British and French (who wanted the AEF in the trenches), and then hit weakened German positions in the summer and autumn of 1918. The fatalism, the wistfulness for the old life gone, the horror of the gas isn't here. It's more like, "We're here, we're gonna do this, oh that sucked, oh that's funny, oh that's sad, we're gonna win this." You look at the American literature that arose from the Great War -- Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald -- and these poems, perhaps because they were published in the official Army newspaper, feel really at odds with the literary retrospective on the war. In an historical sense, it's like discovering the primary sources seem to tell a story at odds with the accepted historical account.

The one name I recognized is famed sportswriter Grantland Rice. Rice is famous for his overwrought prose, and his poetry isn't much better. His poem here, about an artillery barrage, starts out well, but there's little art to it and it's far too long.

 

[youngtrek]

I'm surprised they don't have it on Disney+ along with the Guy Williams series. Or on Netflix with the Banderas movies.

I don’t believe Disney had anything to do with the production of the New World/Family Channel series, so unless they later bought them out then they probably don’t have the rights to stream it.

Quoting from Wikipedia: “The series was shot entirely in Madrid, Spain and produced by New World Television (U.S.), The Family Channel (U.S.), Ellipse Programme of Canal Plus (France), Beta TV (Germany), and RAI (Italy).”

“Since 2011, the series is airing in the United States on Retro Television Network as The New Zorro.” (These bits are often out of date. I don’t know if Retro Television still airs it.)

The next part is the interesting part in regards to our conversation: “Sony Pictures is the distributor for this version of Zorro.” So, it sounds like it would be Sony who would license it out to one of the streaming services.

—David Young

 

[Christopher]

I don’t believe Disney had anything to do with the production of the New World/Family Channel series, so unless they later bought them out then they probably don’t have the rights to stream it.

Both New World and the Family Channel were acquired by Disney in 2001. The cable network originally known as The Family Channel became Fox Family Channel when it was acquired by News Corp, then ABC Family when the Disney Collective assimilated it, and it's now called Freeform.

The next part is the interesting part in regards to our conversation: “Sony Pictures is the distributor for this version of Zorro.” So, it sounds like it would be Sony who would license it out to one of the streaming services.

Okay, then.

 

[Greg Cox]

Just read James Swallow's new DS9 story in the new issue of STAR TREK EXPLORER.

Going to read Una McCormack's story tonight.

 

[Reanok]

I read both Ds9 stories in the Explorer magazine by James Swallow and Una McCormack that were both good stories.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Genesis. Sodom's days are numbered.

(And why do I always, when approaching Genesis 19, find myself thinking of the "Sodom Chamber of Commerce" sketch, from SNL?)

 

[Smiley]

I'm 21% into the novelization of Godzilla (2014) by Greg Cox.

Greg, did you know that Bryan Cranston would play Joe Brody when you were writing the book, or were you given just the information from the script for character traits and features?

 

[Greg Cox]

I'm 21% into the novelization of Godzilla (2014) by Greg Cox.

Greg, did you know that Bryan Cranston would play Joe Brody when you were writing the book, or were you given just the information from the script for character traits and features?

Oh, I definitely had the full cast list. The movie was already in production when I started writing the book.

My biggest challenge, as I recall, was visualizing the MUTOs. I mean, I knew what Godzilla looked like, basically, but the MUTOs were new to this movie and the script didn't describe them in detail, and the SFX were still a work-in-progress. Eventually, though, I managed to get some rough visual reference material on them.

 

[John Clark]

Just finished Forging Hephaestus by Drew Hayes (Enjoyed it). Starting on the sequel Bones of the past.

 

[Christopher]

My biggest challenge, as I recall, was visualizing the MUTOs. I mean, I knew what Godzilla looked like, basically, but the MUTOs were new to this movie and the script didn't describe them in detail, and the SFX were still a work-in-progress. Eventually, though, I managed to get some rough visual reference material on them.

I always felt that the MUTOs were an odd design for a Godzilla movie. Their angular shape was more reminiscent of Gamera kaiju, like Gyaos.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Still in Genesis. Onan has paid the price for shirking his levirate duties. (In the process, he may have only copulated with Tamar once, but she got screwed twice.) Joseph has gone from slave to prisoner to Pharaoh's most trusted adviser.

 

[Commander Troi]

Just finished Wyrd Sisters by Pratchett. Starting book 1 of The Expanse.

 

[Daddy Todd]

As a palate-cleanser (after reading Pawns and Symbols, which was a bit of a slog) I’m reading The Gold Archive 3: Spock’s Brain (which is also a bit of a slog, being mostly about how TOS treated women, littered with copious typos and puzzling sentences.) Now that I have a commute 3 or 4 days a week, I’m listening to audiobooks again. Currently working on the first volume of The Expanse. It’s gonna take all year to finish out this series, but I’m enjoying it a great deal, so I’m OK with that.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Exodus. And I don't mean the Leon Uris novel.

Past Leviticus. Now in Numbers. And it's not a mathematical treatise.

And now beginning Deuteronomy.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

No Ocean Too Wide (novel) by Carrie Turansky - it's about British children who are resettled in Canada despite not being orphans, separated from their ill mother and older sister.

 

[Sci]

How much of the new series have you seen? They did reveal the Fugitive Doctor's origin.

Spoiler: Fugitive Doctor's origin

The Doctor had many lives before the "First" Doctor, having been discovered by the Gallifreyans as a child from another universe, already possessing regeneration, which a Gallifreyan scientist studied and duplicated. This canonizes the "Morbius Doctors" theory that the unidentified past lives we saw in the Doctor's duel with Morbius were earlier lives of the Doctor, rather than of Morbius as I always thought. At some point, the Doctor had their memory of all this erased.

Spoiler: The above

I was aware of that, but I don't think of the Fugitive Doctor as being from the pre-First Doctor incarnations. For one thing, "The Name of the Doctor" strongly implies that the Doctor only adopted that moniker in their "First Doctor" incarnation. It and "The Doctor's Wife" together pretty firmly establish that the First Doctor incarnation was the one to steal the TARDIS, and "An Unearthly Child" establishes that the TARDIS had never gotten stuck in the police call box shape before. Since the Fugitive Doctor clearly calls herself the Doctor and since the TARDIS was already stuck in the police call box shape during her tenure, I concluded that she must have come after the First Doctor. I think it makes sense to place her between the Second and Third Doctors for a couple of reasons: 1) we actually never see the Second Doctor regenerate into the Third Doctor; 2) the Doctor was being punished by the Time Lords, so it fits that they might conscript her into the service of the Division before inducing another regeneration and wiping their memory.

Of course, this has many holes in it, and it might well be retconned or ignored by future seasons. But there's no room for an extra incarnation post-Hartnell, since they were all accounted for in "The Time of the Doctor," with the War Doctor and Ten's abortive regeneration combining with the official eleven Doctors to add up to 13 lives.

Ah, good point! Though that does mean we're stuck wondering about

Spoiler: Fugitive Doctor

the use of the name "Doctor" and the TARDIS's police call box shape.

Sincere there are continuity issues either way, I'm personally inclined to rationalize it by saying the Division gave them one extra regeneration (which the Doctor forgot upon their memory being wiped).

 

[Christopher]

Okay, apparently the Fugitive Doctor's place in the chronology is less explicitly established than I thought: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Fugitive_Doctor#Behind_the_scenes

Spoiler

I agree it makes more sense if she's after Hartnell, but we've already had one "secret Doctor" inserted between incarnations, so it's awkward. Also, the Fugitive's company-woman personality, being part of the Gallifreyan intelligence service and more willing to use violence, works better if it's part of the Doctor's distant past that they grew beyond. The War Doctor was willing to go darker than usual, but was still a rogue operator reluctant to work with the Time Lords. And it's just hard to imagine the Doctor's character changing so much between the Troughton and Pertwee incarnations, which for all their surface differences had very similar moral cores.

And I admit, though I was uncomfortable with it in some ways, I think there's worthwhile potential in the idea of multiple pre-"First" Doctors, opening the door to new stories and, as we've already glimpsed, more diverse casting opportunities. (Maybe when Division did whatever they did to erase the Doctor's past and regress them to childhood, the forced regression did some damage and that's why the Doctor's regeneration settings were stuck on "white male" for an entire cycle, until they got a full reset on Trenzalore.)

 

[Smiley]

I've read my second five-star book of the year:

B^F by Ryan North - a page-by-page review and critique of the novelization of Back to the Future from 1985

It's a fun journey to see what choices were made in this novelization and how later revisions to the script made BttF a better movie. I highly recommend this book for fans of the movie Back to the Future. While the Tumblr version may still be around, I think the ebook for $2.99 is easier on the eyes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Joshua. Lots of war stories. Fertile source for anybody looking to "prooftext" a justification for war, for cultural genocide, and for swordpoint/gunpoint religious conversions.