Bravo to Turner Classic Movies for presenting the in-theater Frankenstein double feature. What the original 1931 Frankenstein lacks in pace, humor, and music is more than made up by James Whale’s incomparable 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, featuring Franz Waxman’s famous, lavish score that was re-used by Universal many times, most notably for the Flash Gordon serials. The picture and sound quality for both movies is better than I’ve ever seen, and I assume the new Blu-ray releases are from the same sources.
Category: Sci-Fi
TCM presents Frankenstein Double Feature
I’m planning/hoping to go to see Bill “Karloff” Pratt tonight in his most famous role:
Soundclouds!
Brian Sibley, distinguished Man of Letters and friend of the blog, interviewing Ray Bradbury.
Lia Pamina, the sweetest of Spaniards, and likewise a friend of the blog, has a delightful song that’s been remixed by her talented producer, Robbie Leff.
And here’s a catchy tune I caught on BBC Radio 2.
The Father of Modern Science Fiction
Ray Bradbury has died. He called himself a writer of Fantasy fiction, but I think of Bradbury the same way as I do Vonnegut, as a writer of “soft” Science Fiction, and he helped to redefine in my mind what the genre was, and could be. “Hard” Sci-Fi is old school, with an emphasis on getting the science right, or at least making it somewhat plausible. Bradbury’s plots include space ships and time travel, but these are merely the trappings of his stories. In contrast to the strength of Bradbury’s ideas, his prose has a delicacy that isn’t found in the work of Asimov or Heinlein.
Denro had these comments:
I recalled that everyone I knew read “Martian Chronicles” in Jr. High… not because we had too, but because we wanted to. That was my intro to Bradbury and still my favorite, I guess. Plenty of comic stories came out of there! Along with a comic book store name.
Being a collection of related short stories, The Martian Chronicles is a particularly accessible book for young readers. Not since reading Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman in the third grade had I been affected as much by a book as I was by The Martian Chronicles. Later, I was pleased to learn that in the 1950’s some of Bradbury’s stories had been adapted in comic books and in radio shows like X Minus 1.
[audio:http://archive.org/download/XMinus1_A/xminusone_550508_MarsIsHeaven.mp3|titles=X Minus One: Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury]The Million Year Picnic is a comic book store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. It was named by its founder Jerry Weist after the last story in The Martian Chronicles, and having opened in 1974 it was one of the first shops dedicated to selling comics.
Moebius strip
When I noted the passing of Ralph McQuarrie last week, I also thought of the cartoonist Jean Giraud, and now the man who called himself Moebius is also dead. Giraud came to mind because he was one of the artists who worked on Alien, along with Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger. As influential as Star Wars was, only two years later, while The Empire Strikes Back was in production, Alien redefined the look and feel of Sci-Fi movies.
A close encounter with Douglas Trumbull
Director and legendary special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull lives in Western Massachusetts. Monday on WBUR he spoke with Tom Ashbrook about the future of cinema.
[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2012/03/onpoint_0305_2.mp3|titles=Tom Ashbrook interviews Douglas Trumbull]Trumbull talks about 3-D movies, and he brings up the very important point that 3-D is very DIM in movie theaters, and they need to be much brighter. I’d go further and say that in general movies are, like today’s comic books, much too dark and colorless.
