Messing With the Timeline: Star Wars on HBO

My wife and I have become addicted to the TV show Weeds. It's excellent. Smart and funny, that's what we like. Anyway, as is so often the case, I ended up on a Wikipedia tangent-a-thon this evening. It went like this: Weeds > Showtime > HBO and then I jumped over to Youtube to watch this, the old HBO feature presentation logo thing from the early-mid 80s.*

My family didn't have cable until I was in high school, just in time for Mike Nelson's run on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But growing up, my VHS copy of Star Wars was one that my uncle had taped off of HBO. I still have that tape somewhere. I hope. Anyway, as kids do when they watch the same thing thousands of times, I had the rhythm of the whole tape down: first, there's the tail end of an HBO documentary special on women in prison or something, meh. Then a promo for an upcoming Neil Young concert broadcast, with Neil singing After the Gold Rush ("Look at mother nature on the run in the 1980s"), oh boy here we go. Then a bit about how the following feature presentation has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America, and parental guidance is suggested, because this movie is the best one ever, and you should guide your children to it. Then the spinning HBO thing, discussed above, SUPER-exciting. Then the 20th Century Fox drumroll and the Lucasfilm logo and holy crap the STAR WARS and the music and the words flying off into oblivion and the giant spaceships and then your 3-year-old heart explodes because STAR WARS!**

Now, here's the thing. I saw Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back on VHS, and Return of the Jedi in the theater. But! Tonight I discovered this other video on Youtube. Puzzle pieces contained therein: ads for the premiere of both Star Wars and Fraggle Rock, both coming to HBO "next month." But according to Wikipedia, Fraggle Rock (alright, I'm sick of italics) premiered on HBO in January 1983. Return of the Jedi came to theaters in May, 1983. Was my discovery and enthusiastic embrace of all things Star Wars really within the span of just a few months? The whole timeline of my youth has just been contracted. Baked in an oven and shrinky-dinked (or is shrunky-dunk the past participle of shrinky-dink?).

I am well aware of the accelerating nature of time. When you're a child, a year is an eternity. The first four years of elementary school seems like a geologic age, to say nothing of K-12 education as a whole. And I've been out of college for six years now, gone in a blink. This is not a new idea to me. Pink Floyd wrote songs about it. But to go back now and see how short a span of time it must have been between the first time I saw Star Wars (Episode IV, A New Hope, nerds***) and Return of the Jedi, I'm awestruck. In my memory, those events were years apart. I guess little kids' internal clocks just run fast, like hummingbirds or mayflies. They can fill their days and take in information and digest it and move on and do it again so much faster than adults.

So remember, the next time a Sunday afternoon slips away from you and you spend it reading the archives of Bill Simmons' articles on ESPN.com instead of cleaning the gutters like you planned, that somewhere, in the same amount of time, little kids are experiencing their equivalent of the rise and fall of the Roman empire.

Or maybe video games and MTV ruined all that. Get off my lawn.

* I also found this hilariously self-important "making of the HBO opening logo" film from around the same time. Two things stuck out in this thing: 1) they spent a lot of time and money on that project and 2) whoever wrote the song featured throughout this insider look must have been told "Pretend you're Billy Joel, only less talented. Now write a song for a Reading Rainbow segment about the incomplete nature of human perception. Now make it more condescending."
** Given the Pavlovian connection of the promo and Star Wars in my mind, I've gone so far (full confession) as to put an mp3 of the HBO music on my iPod, so it plays at the beginning of my copy of the Star Wars score album. This kicks lots of nerdy ass.
*** Remember when the number IV in front of that movie felt full of promise instead of disappointment?

DC Storytapes Teach Classical Music

When I was a kid, I had a number of book-and-tape sets, featuring short storybooks and cassettes that read the story for you. In addition to the typical Star Wars, Disney and Peanuts sets, I also had three sets made by Fisher-Price featuring DC Comics characters. These were a cut above the average storytape set: each featured a snazzy hardback book with a little plastic envelope on the back for the tape and all-original art by major DC artists like Jim Aparo and Joe Orlando, and a nicely-written (to my spotty memory) version of each superhero's mythology.

I had three. There was the Batman one, entitled "Batman and Robin the Teen Wonder in the Case of the Laughing Sphinx," which featured the Dynamic Duo against the Joker, Penguin, Riddler and Catwoman, and also told Robin's origin. There was a Superman one called "From Krypton to Metropolis," which included Superman's origin, his time as Superboy and the version of Lex Luthor's origin in which he lost his hair during an experiment in Smallville and turned against Superboy/man in the process. The Wonder Woman one was called "Cheetah on the Prowl," and had her origin and a story where she saves her boyfriend's army base from supervillainess the Cheetah. There was also a Justice League of America one I didn't have.

The reason I bring this up is that each of them used a single piece of classical music as the background theme music. The Batman music I know real well: it was Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," famous pop-culturally for its segment in the original Fantasia, which worked really well. The stuttering opening notes of the piece still say Batman to me. Wonder Woman used a heroic fanfare bit from Franz Liszt's "Les Preludes," (the motif in question is declared triumphantly at 6:49 in the video) which was also the theme to the old (1930s & 40s) Buck Rogers serials. I hadn't known what piece it was for about a decade and a half, until my college music history prof played a bit of it in class, and it hit me like a ton of bricks in a moment of AHA. I don't remember what the Superman music was, but have long wondered what bit of music has been bouncing around my subconscious, secretly associated with the Man of Steel. Doug Diamond's Music 262 course at Grinnell solved the Wonder Woman problem. If I stumble upon the Superman book or especially the tape at a thrift or collectible store some day, I might just have to pony up a buck or two to find out.

(Hat tip for the images to some person on Fortunecity.)

Hiya hiya hiya

The time has come for the obligatory, masturbatory, self-indulgent first post of this blog. I suppose all blogging is self-indulgent, and all references to the self-indulgence of blogs are obligatory. Even gratuitous. Pandering.

The title of this post should be read like Fozzie Bear. As he himself once typed for Kermit's script: "Ladies and genklefins, welcun again ty the Muppel Shoks. My name is Kermit the Forg."

Why a blog? Because there's weird, esoteric stuff that sticks in my brain in odd combinations sometime, and hopefully this blog will give me the opportunity to scrape out the inside of my head like a pumpkin. Gross. Anyway, I've got posts percolating on DC comics, classical music, and my disdain for Residence Inn advertisements. Rest assured, whatever you read here will be nerdy.

Nerdy and probably not timely. My employers would certainly frown on using work time for this sort of thing, so I'll generally be writing piecemeal, at lunchtime, after work, at home, and then posting a finished bit once I randomly remember it's there. I'm writing this at lunch on a Thursday, and it'll likely be posted sometime on Friday if I think of it (UPDATE: I did). I don't know why I'm telling you this, except probably to cover my own ass. Ass: covered.

Ladies and genklefins, I'll have some real content sooner or later. Hope you'll stop by for that.

O Zelda, Where Art Thou?

Originally posted at WayIPlay.com (now defunct)

Well, it’s been confirmed now that Zelda: Twilight Princess won’t be coming out until the fall. Dang. I suppose on the other hand (the hand opposed to the reaction of “Dang”), this gives me time to finally finish Ocarina of Time.

Like Final Fantasy VII, I’ve been working on Zelda’s N64 debut for a while (although only a few years, as opposed to the decade I was approaching on FF7). Unlike Square’s magum opus, though, I’ve actually enjoyed all of the gameplay. I made a tactical error a couple years ago, though, one that seriously set back my completion of the game.

Before I really started getting back into gaming in January ‘04, I had already bought a used N64 and a handful of games: Mario 64, Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Rogue Squadron, and Ocarina of Time. I made some very good progress in the latter in 2003, getting as far as the Fire Temple (about halfway through the game, by my estimate). Then, in Spring 2004, I got a Gamecube. And the Zelda Collector’s Edition that included a GC port of Ocarina. And I sold my copy of the N64 cart. Whoops. So now I’m back at nearly square one (last I checked I was in Dodongo’s Cavern/Goron City, having played for a few hours one day last year) of a game that took maybe 15-20 hours to play as far and in as much detail as I had. Whoops again.

But as previously noted, I’ve got some time now. Maybe I’ll even dip into Majora’s Mask when I’m done, although the idea of playing a Zelda game in which your actions have to be completed within a certain time kinda freaks me out.

Cashing my chips

Originally posted at WayIPlay.com (now defunct)

I first played Final Fantasy VII in 1997 on my friend’s Playstation. I admired its atmosphere: the typically fine (if sometimes overburdened) Nobuo Uematsu score; the gorgeous prerendered backgrounds; the attractive adaptation of the Final Fantasy battle system to 3d. When the game was released for Windows PC the following year, I bought it. I played on and off over the summer of 1998, and then shelved the game during the school year. This became a typical pattern: brief flurries of progress, spaced out over months or even years.

I didn’t even finish the first disc (of three) until the summer of 2001, 4 years after starting the game. During my tenure with the game, I’ve played it on five computers: four of my own and, during one winter break, one of my parents’. And in that time, I earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree, completed a five-level course in improvisation, am now a year and a half into a career in engineering, and have met a lovely girl (Note 3/18/10: We're married now. -F).
One thing I haven’t done in the past 8 years is finish the damn game. At the beginning of 2005, I made a New Year’s resolution: to finish Final Fantasy VII before the year was out. Last night, I decided to call it off. I will not finish the game, or play any more of it.
The thing is, it’s a deeply flawed game. The gameplay is just fine. I like fighting monsters, gathering equipment, managing a party of warriors. But the gameplay is increasingly spread out between ponderous stretches of PLOT. The story also has potential interest. But the delivery is abysmal. Scenes of plot or character development are presented in a combination of nicely-rendered, 30-second full motion videos (of the kind that was used to foist the game on the public in TV ads) and tone-deaf, emotionless, in-game scenes, such as the “moving” death of Aeris, pictured above. The former are pretty but feel out of place, seeing as they account for about 1% of game time. The latter are like watching Lego people try to emote, which gets especially tricky when it’s not always clear which one of them is supposed to be talking, and their lines are poorly translated from the original Japanese.
The in-game scenes are further hampered by a total lack of change in the music. The same midi tune that accompanied your 20-minute wanderings in a given cave will also accompany the 20-minute scene — and all its dramatic turns — at the end of the cave. These bits that are supposed to keep you going through the hundreds of random battles, minigames, and Chocobo breeding stints spread over a hundred hours? No, thank you.
As previously mentioned, I don’t dislike console RPG mechanics, or the Final Fantasy series. I don’t even have a problem with long scenes between gameplay. I just prefer it to be in a game capable of making me care. My buddy Nels hates the Metal Gear Solid series for this reason, but I enjoy it, because at least I can perceive dramatic highs and lows in those scenes. I also give a pass to Final Fantasy IV, because when I first played it, I was 14, and by the time I went back to play it, they had fixed the translation.
So, it’s been a long time coming, but I have finally decided to stop my quixotic and poorly-paced quest to complete Final Fantasy VII. I feel as though a load has been lifted, which will allow me to refocus my energy on more important goals.
Like Final Fantasy Tactics.

Why Sony cannot and should not win the portable gaming market

Originally posted at WayIPlay.com

I bought Burnout: Legends tonight. Looking forward to playing it, I popped it into my PSP. After the PSP loading screen, it said:

“To start you must update the system software.”

Ok, fair enough. Out to the main menu. Find the System 1.52 update.

“The AC adapter is not attached. Please attach the AC adapter, and then try again.”

Alright, you’re throwing up a lot of barriers, but I’ll dig it out and hook it up.

“The battery is low. Please charge the battery, and then try again.”

Screw you, Sony, I’m going to play Go! Fight! Cheersquad.

Ravenholm update

Originally posted at WayIPlay.com

I played Half-Life 2 on Friday for the first time since February. I am now in the thick of Ravenholm, and have encountered every horrible thing that the sleepy little hamlet has to offer: all three varieties of headcrab and zombie.

As I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere, I’m a great big wuss when it comes to Ravenholm. I actually wouldn’t mind the lightning-fast, shrieking, skeletal zombies leaping at me from the rooftops if giant spidery-looking things didn’t subsequently jump off of them.

The worst, of course, are the poison headcrabs. They look like giant spiders, they move like giant spiders (say what you will about the creepiness of the original headcrabs — I could usually remind myself that they looked like walking Thanksgiving turkeys), and they make rattling/hissing noises like the giant spiders in movies. These things scare the bejeezus out of me. Given the opportunity, if I know or suspect that one of these is around the corner, I will saturate the area with grenades rather than face the potential of having to watch one of these move. I should also note that I’ve been playing through Ravenholm on God mode, so none of these things can actually HURT me.

If that wasn’t enough, the poison zombies each carry four poison headcrabs, and can throw them at you from up to two stories below. Typically at that point I’m too busy spontaneously evacuating my bowels to actually kill the things.

2009 Addition: SEE! Horrifying!