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FEATURED THREADS for 5-26-22

 
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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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PostPosted: Thu May 26, 2022 4:55 pm    Post subject: FEATURED THREADS for 5-26-22 Reply with quote



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My gift to the loyal All Sci-Fi who are helping me keep our board alive. Very Happy

Below are two posts which describe ideas for sequels to classic sci-fi movies. Coming up with stuff like that iswhat I love doing better than anything else.

The third post is about that movie that made sensitive and intelligent people get pretty emotional at the end. I'm looking forward to the sequel Spielberg wants to make: E.T. Joins the Starship Troopers!

I hope a few of you folks will offer comments on these threads. The board needs to show more activity if we expect new folks to join us.

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1950s Science Fiction Sequels!
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Here's what I have in mind for a sequel to The Thing from Another World.

It would basically be what I described in my post on page 7 of the thread for this movie, in which I described what the aliens tried to do when they sent the ship which crashed in the arctic.

The sequel would be the story of the second attempt to invade the Earth, in which things go according to the aliens' plan — unlike what happened in the movie. That wonderful film actually caused us to make some false assumptions about the aliens — assumption which don't bear up under close scrutiny.

Here's what I mean. Very Happy

~ Common Assumption 1# - The alien came from Mars.

None of us smart guys here ever assumed this of course, but John Q. Public took this notion for granted the minute Scotty said, "A man from Mars! Holy Cow!"

However, if the alien did NOT come from Mars, where did it come from? Certainly not from any planet in our solar system.

Actually, we don't have to look any farther than Alpha Centauri B, where astronomers have found a rocky Earth-sized planet which they named Alpha Centauri Bd. It's just four light years away as the crow flies. Practically spittin' distance!

But how did the alien ship get here? Did it have hyperdrive?

Nope, it didn't need it! Very Happy

Let's assume that the ship got a tremendous boost from a launch system when it left Alpha Centauri Bd, and it tore off towards Earth at a healthy 1% the speed of light. Since Alpha Centauri is 4 years away at the speed of light, the journey would take 400 (. . . ish) years, along with a few years for deceleration as well.

~ Common Assumption 2# - There was only one alien in the crashed saucer.

Nope. There were 10 ( . . . ish). Yes, I know, the ship was little, but that's okay because (Drum roll, please! Very Happy) they were all in suspended animation!

And these clever aliens didn't have to waste a dime on complex cryogenic equipment. They just put nine of the ten crewmen in a tank barely large enough to hold them all. Then they topped it off with water.

Once the crew was immersed in water, they simply exposed the interior of the ship to the vacuum of space, and the water in the sealed tank froze solid!

After all, we know for a fact that these aliens can sleep like little lambs in a block of ice! So, freezing them for 400 years would be as easy as tossing bag of Bird's Eye peas into your freezer!



Remember, the original story — Who Goes There? — states that the lone alien had been frozen in the Antarctic ice for eons. But once it thawed out it was all set to convert every living being on Earth into close cousins, whether they wanted to be part of the family or not!

Meanwhile, the tenth alien is the designated driver when the ship reaches Earth, so he's put into a separate tank equipped with a timer, set to go off in 400 years so that when the ship reaches the Sol system he gets a wake-up call and a warm bath, while the cabin is being pressurized and heated up, just for him!

Presto! Captain James T. Karrot of the starship Eggplant, on final approach to Earth!

His mission: to seek out one world and one civilization! To boldly go where no mango has gone before! Laughing

~ Common Assumption 3# - Only one ship came from the alien world.

Golly, I've always thought it would be mighty dumb for the aliens to invade Earth with just one ship and one lone pilot! But I realized today that neither of those assumptions are logical.

I think the Alpha Centaurians sent 10 ( . . . ish) ships, a meager fleet of those small spacecraft to be sure, but certainly better than just one! And since each ship has 10 aliens in those very inexpensive cryogenic chambers, that means there are 100 invading aliens!

But what happened to the other nine ships?

Well, during a 400-year journey across 4 light years, plenty of bad luck can occur. Hitting any little pebble in space at 1% the speed of light would cause a lot more damage than just a cosmic fender-bender!

Or the wake-up timers might not have worked on a few of the ships, so they just sailed on past Sol and kept right on going.

Plus we know that the ships were nuclear powered (hence the radiation the alien emitted all through the movie), so one-or-more of the ships' atomic engines might have melted down and fried the crew like battered okra in a hot frying pan! Shocked

The aliens' invasion plan, of course, was for Captain Karrot and his colleagues to pilot the fleet into low Earth orbit and then start surveying the surface, shopping for real estate that had warm, sunny weather and fertile soil.

Of course, the only thing the Alph Centaurians knew about Earth was just what we know about Alpha Centauri Bd — that it's a planet the right size and distance from the sun to support life.

In view of that, just imagine how pleased the alien captains would have been when they looked down and saw places like Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma (where the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain! Very Happy)



Yes, indeed! This was an invasion of agriculturally-minded space explorers — an army of Agri-nauts one might say — whose motto was (in Latin):

Veni, vidi, coluerunt!

"We came, we saw, we cultivated!"

On the planet below they could see miles and miles of incredibly fertile fields, all tilled and ready for the corn and wheat and alfalfa to be plowed under and replaced by a huge bumper crop of Alien Baby Plants, fed by the nutrients obtained from countless cows, chickens, pigs, and red-blooded farmers who would be forced to show the aliens how to drive the tractors before they where hung upside down in the barn with their throats cut . . . like the rest of their families! Shocked



Unfortunately for poor Captain Karrot in the classic movie, he woke up from his 400-year nap and found himself all alone in space. The rest of his fleet was MIA, for reasons unknown! Sad

And to make matters worse, his own starship was limping along on an engine that wasn't hitting on all eight atomic cylinders!

Desperately he tried to find a landing place that was remote enough to hide in, but still fertile enough for him and his still hibernating popsicle crew to start a small farm and raise a little family which included a few hundred blood-thirsty alien children to help him conquer the Earth!

Captain Karrot did his heroic best, but he overshot his intended landing area — Alaska (which is listed as one the ten most fertile states in the U.S.), and he crash-landed near the North Pole.

Bummer . . .



That would have been all she wrote for poor Captain Karrot, but he had one last bit of luck when he was rescued by the folks in the movie and given one last chance to turn all the scientists, GI's, Eskimos, and sled dogs into Gerber's Baby Food and salvage the ambitious invasion plans of his intelligent race.

But, as we all know, the clever humans proved conclusively that a group of America's best military men, teamed up with the finest scientific minds on the planet, were capable of barely defeating one lone, desperate alien in a last ditch effort which — if it had failed — would have meant the end of mankind.

Gee, when you put it that way, we didn't do all that great, did we? Shocked

Like Scotty said, we need to watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.




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Now, exactly what am I proposing for the sequel?
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In the sequel, the 2nd wave of the invasion ships has much better luck than the first wave, in which only one ship out ten makes it to Earth, and even that one crashes, with only one member of the crew actually surviving!

Perhaps the second fleet of ships incorporated advancements which prevented the mishaps and malfunctions that caused all but one of the first wave from even reaching Earth!

As a result, all-or-most of the ten ships in the second wave succeed . . . just as I described above! Shocked

The invasion fleet reaches Earth, and their thawed-out pilots put their ships into orbit around Earth while they survey our fertile planet. The pilots agree on the best landing site — a region in Oklahoma with miles and miles of cultivated land they can use to start raising their army of invaders!

But how should this story end? We can't just let these vegetable-based creatures proliferate right in the middle of America's Bread Basket until they've created an army of inhuman soldiers which use the technologically advanced weapons they've brought to defeat us!

It occurs to me that they might even have brought equipment capable of synthesizing biological weapons that would be effective on humans . . . but not on the plant-based physiology of the aliens!

This could be the ruthless method they've used on other worlds with sentient animal life forms they've conquered.

So, this story involves the aliens' efforts to wipe out mankind with a plague which leaves our plant devoid of human life . . . while remaining rich in animal life that the blood-thirsty aliens use to feed their own species . . .


What do you think, guys?_
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1950s Science Fiction Sequels!

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A sequel to 20 Million Miles to Earth . . . with the story set on Venus.

Hmmm . . .

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At first that might sound like just another 1950s movie about space explorers landing on an alien world. What movies of that type come to mind?

Well, there’s Destination Moon, with a crew landing on Earth’s dead Moon.






Missile to the Moon offers a more friendly experience for the astronauts, but the movie is basically pretty goofy, so I’m sure it’s nobody’s favorite.





And then there’s Rocketship X-M, an intelligent movie about a mission to the Red Planet which discovers the sad remnants of a civilization destroyed by atomic war.





On the other hand, The Angry Red Planet offers a world of strange plants and animals . . . along with an advanced civilization only glimpsed from afar . . . who warns mankind not to ever come back!





The flip side of this is Queen of Outer Space, with a version of Venus that offers gorgeous, love-starved women who can’t wait to welcome Earthmen into their loving arms!





Journey to the 7th Planet — the planet with the funny name — seems to be populated by sexy ladies, but the space explorers find out otherwise, and they barely escape with their lives. Shocked
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Amidst all these enjoyable films from the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 20 Million Miles to Earth, which doesn’t take us TO Venus . . . it brings something back FROM Venus!

But in doing so, we find out that our understanding of Earth’s sister world is seriously flawed. It's not the hellish world of searing temperatures and a poisonous atmosphere that scientists claim it is! It harbors life — and these life forms can even survive and flourish when brought back to Earth.

In fact, the life form brought back by the Venusian mission, was so adapt as surviving on Earth that it hatched out of an egg, grew at an accelerated rate, and sought a food source without threatening the animals it uncounted on Earth.






My point, of course, is that the environmental conditions on Venus (according to this movie) must be very similar to those here on Earth. And if that’s true, a second mission to Venus would only need moderate environmental equipment to survive. But the biggest threat is the horrible disease which killed many of the crew on the first mission. Precautions against the disease would be absolutely necessary.

However, the real revelation the movie provides is the idea that a Venusian life form could hatch from an egg and survive on an alien planet for as long at it did, despite all the aggressive actions taken against it!

Furthermore, it can be argued that the Ymir might have a high order of a intelligence, since it broke out of the gelatinous mass, stood right up, walked around with no trouble —






— then smashed out the cage it was placed in and found a bag of sulfur, a substance which Dennis Hopper stated was one of its food sources on Venus.

Think for a moment just how helpless most Earth animals are immediately after birth. I realize that most of this could be explained as mere instinct, but we should bear in mind that the only aggressive behavior the Ymir demonstrated occurred when a dog attacked it, a man stabbed it with a pitchfork, and it had to defend itself against the elephant.

And when those things happened, it fought in a manner that showed cunning and a lack of fear.






Furthermore, when it was attacked by the military at the Colosseum it didn’t try to attack the tanks, the way a rhinoceros or a bull might, nor did it try to hide in the lower levels of the building, which would be another animal-like response.

What it did instead was seek the high ground by climbing to the top of the building . . . and then it used large blocks of stone as weapons, throwing them down onto the soldiers!

Animals don't use weapons. Shocked








Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that the Ymir was intelligent!

What this means concerning a sequel is that the second expedition would go to Venus after already deciding they might have brought back a specimen that was more than just an animal! Knowing this, they would try to determine just how intelligent the Ymir are, while studying them in a manner that did the life form no harm.

Perhaps the level of the Ymir’s intelligence is roughly that of the dolphins, so the explorers might not find things like villages and a rudimentary tool-using technology. But then again, the foggy nature of Venus might mean that a more careful study of the planet from high orbit using radar to map the surface could turn up some real surprises.

Finally, there’s this.

Dennis Hopper states (in effect) that it’s imperative for mankind to develop the ability to establish mining colonies on Venus because it is rich in many of the resources needed by mankind. But if the Ymir population turn out to be vicious and territorial, this might prove to be a real threat to our efforts to establish colonies.

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E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

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IMDB has 127 trivia items for this movie. Here’s a few of the ones I found the most interesting, in the blue text. Very Happy
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~ The Halloween scene, where E.T. sees a child in a Yoda costume and seems to recognize him, suggests that they are from the same galaxy. In Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), in the galactic senate scene where all the senators are on their feet shouting, you can see E.T. species among the senate pods in the lower right corner.

Note from me: This is a clever observation, and it actually makes sense! Very Happy

~ The end of the film was one of the most significant musical experiences for composer John Williams. After several attempts were made to match the score to the film, Steven Spielberg took the film off the screen and encouraged Williams to conduct the orchestra the way he would at a concert. He did, and Spielberg slightly re-edited the film to match the music, which is unusual since normally the music would be edited to match the film. The result was Williams winning the 1982 Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Note from me: That magnificent conclusion is indeed quite powerful because of the way the shots are energized by the marvelous music. I admire the fact that Spielberg and Williams found a way to maximize the effect on the audience.

~ At one point during filming, Drew Barrymore was consistently forgetting her lines, annoying Steven Spielberg to the point where he actually yelled at her. He later found out that she had reported to work with a very high fever. Feeling guilty, he hugged her and apologized repeatedly as she cried and cried. He then sent her home - with a note from her director.

Note from me: This sort of makes me wonder why Drew's mother would send her off to work with a fever. She probably didn't know. At least I hope not. Sad

~ The script was largely written while on location filming for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) during filming breaks. Steven Spielberg dictated the story to screenwriter Melissa Mathison who was there with her then-boyfriend and future husband Harrison Ford.

Note from me: This says a lot about Spielberg's talent. He was able to "multi-task" in a very impressive way.

~ When it was test-screened at the Cannes Film Festival as an unofficial entry, it brought the house down, receiving a standing ovation that had eluded most of the official entries.

Note from me: This film doesn't move everybody to the same degree (see Bogmeister's negative review above), but I'm sure the reaction of the folks at Cannes was very gratifying to Spielberg.

~ Steven Spielberg stated in an interview that E.T. was a plant-like creature, and neither male nor female.

Note from me: What a weird idea! I can't think of anything in the movie that might support the idea that E.T. was physiologically similar to The Thing from Another World! Shocked

~ According to the film's novelization, E.T. is over ten million years old.

Note from me: I'm sorry, but that sounds a bit extreme. I might accept a few thousand years . . . but not ten million years for Pet's sake!

~ At one point, Gertie looks down at E.T. and says, "I don't like his feet." This was ad-libbed by Drew Barrymore and was actually her referring to the grouping of wires coming out of the E.T. puppet. She also ad-libbed the line, "Give me a break!" after Elliott tells her only little kids can see E.T.

Note from me: The "Give me a break" line was hysterical! Laughing

~ The gag where the mother looks in the closet and sees the alien surrounded by toys was dreamed up by Robert Zemeckis.

Note from me: Another great moment is this enjoyable movie. Very Happy

~ ET's plants included some made from inflated condoms with polyester blooms.

Note from me: Gee, I guess on E.T.'s planet the rubber trees actually grow rubbers! Laughing

~ The role of Mary, the children's mother, was first offered to Shelley Long but she had already signed to film Night Shift (1982) and was forced to decline.

Note from me: Miss Long is enjoyable in comedy roles, but I don't think she would have suited the role of Elliot's mother.

_________________
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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